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Did you get enough Fringe Crush? May 31, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Events, Fringe, Web Sites, statistics, OrlandoScene, Arts, bloggingfringe , add a comment

This year I thought I’d employ a bit of science to my Blogging of Fringe - I was worried the site had turned into all Fringe Crush, all the time, and completely about local acts instead of National and International. I was mostly right.

Here are some handy graphs to point out why we suck:
Fringe Crush Wins
Here we see Text only posts at 10%
VoiceMail Reviews and audio at 13%
Any non-Fringe Crush videos at 37%
Fringe Crush takes it home with 41%

My second criticism is that we favored local, and the numbers don’t lie:
Local vs. Otherwise
International 6%
National Acts 13%
On the Fringe 38%
Local Artists 43%

This scale is even graded on a curve, because I counted Bric-a-Brac as national because they’re from Austin, but they all used to live here, and they were produced by Beth. And the only things in the “On the Fringe” category were folks who were not in shows, but many of them have been in the past.

That means we had a distribution like this:
Us and Them
I guess 19% isn’t bad for Long Tail content. I’d like to do better. It’s a mission of mine to keep that number above 20% all the time, so I guess we did pretty well this time.

The Videos and Audio did have some categories we threw them in:
Content Channels
The new Fringe Moments were 11%
The VoiceMail Reviews at only 13%
The favorite Fringe Crush with 41%
Everything else this year with 35%

Also, I was very proud of us when I found out Beth would be presenting a Fringe Crush award for the show with the most crushes. Denna counted up the results, and by no surprise, VarieTease won! I think that’s a challenge to the cast of Oral to do some more campaigning for next year.

One last statistic, of the 32 shows I saw, 55% of them were not local.
Local vs. Otherwise, tickets bought
Again, we’re counting Bric-A-Brac and Parlour Games as National, because they are… sortof.

Final Weekend of Fringe May 23, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Blogging, Orlando, Links, Events, Reviews, Fringe, OrlandoScene, Theatre, bloggingfringe , 1 comment so far

Only 3 more days! (plus Patron’s Pick Day) Looks like When Pigs Fly and Alice in Wonderland have already been announced as Patron’s Picks for their venues, which sort of makes sense. If you’re interested in supporting the Fringe AND seeing TJ Dawe, check out Monday morning at 11:30, when TJ will be performing the Slip Knot.

As we rolled into the weekend last night with some light rain and lots of folks crowding the Shakespeare Center, I noticed three college-looking kids soliciting people for photographs. I walked up to tell them about Blogging Fringe, and it turned out they were the Orlando Metromix “SHOCK SQUAD”! Is Metromix the Sentinel one, that’s going to be changing their name? It’s not CityBeat, is it? It’s one of those. I went to see what coverage they had of the festival, and it was exactly one article - recommendations based on watching the preview. Also, no comments allowed. They asked me to link to them, and in hopes that they link back, here we go.

Check out Orlando Metromix’s Fringe Photoset - lots of familiar faces in there.

Last night, I lost my festival program. Normally no big deal, but this was different - I had written all sorts of notes in my program, marked down page numbers of shows, kept my tickets inside, and started to feel like my program was a treasured item - sort of like a stuffed animal or something, now lost. I checked the Brown Venue, the Blue Venue, the Ticket Booth, and the Garbage Can too, but my program was gone. I went to the box office to get some tickets re-printed ( handy reason for using credit card or the internet to buy your tickets), and proceeded to go through the tickets I did have with the volunteer to make sure I wasn’t missing any others.

Apparently, I’ve seen a lot of shows:

  1. A Brief History of Petty Crime
  2. American Squatter
  3. Boom
  4. *Flamenco con Fusion 08
  5. Galapagos: The Directors Cut
  6. **Here Be Dragons
  7. *Mark Baratelli
  8. Move!
  9. MR. FOX
  10. *Mr. Marmalade
  11. **New Rochelle
  12. On Second Thought
  13. *once upon a time: The End
  14. Oral
  15. Parlour Games
  16. perfectly broken
  17. Power To Pleasing: The Sex Lives of Teenage Girls
  18. *Red, White, and Ignorant: An American Love Story
  19. **Reefer Madness
  20. Shadows In Bloom
  21. Skip Peril and the Players of the Lost Trunk
  22. *Swell
  23. The Boy’s Own Jedi Handbook
  24. *The Bric-a-Brac Vagabond Vintage Variety Show
  25. The Cody Rivers Show presents: Stick to Glue
  26. The Greg Barris Heart of Darkness Rock and Roll Circus
  27. *The Slipknot: A Benefit for the Orlando Fringe
  28. Totem Figures
  29. TV iMature
  30. *Wet
  31. **VarieTEASE: No. 24 Doll Factory
  32. When Pigs Fly

* Indicates shows I have not seen, but I have a ticket for.
** Shows I saw after writing this blog post.

All of these shows (that I have seen) are awesome. Go see them all. If I could only tell you three, I would include The Cody Rivers Show, On Second Thought and Boom (not in that order). I would say Power to Pleasing, but it’s sold out. I continue to tell folks that if they haven’t seen any dance, they MUST go - we always have great dance at this festival, and I’m seeing all of the 5 dance shows this year. Lastly, (not leastly) if you’ve never seen TJ Dawe, Barry Smith, Jimmy Hogg, Greg Landucci, Gemma Wilcox or any of the other out-of-town monologists (like Paul Hutcheson from On Second Thought, mentioned earlier), they are all worth your time and money. This is also not counting Patron’s Pick day, where I plan to see some shows that have floated to the top, but I managed to miss. It should be a fun experience.

What was also a fun experience was getting a random contact from some folks from Rake Theatre down in Boynton Beach - they’re putting on Fluency this week at the Fringe. Apparently, they are wanting to start an all-Florida arts blog - a very ambitious project. I have about 3 such very ambitious projects in my head, in the works with locals, or I at least own the domain name for them.

The South Florida folks’ project is called, of all things, Florida Arts Blog, which is a Wordpress.com site right now, but for some reason the posts about Fringe have disappeared… ::shrug:: Something and someone to watch in the coming weeks and months. I am trying to sell them on Florida Creatives myself, blogging can come later. They’ve also got a link to Mark’s Orlando Arts Blog up there… I wonder if they’ve been emailing him too…?

Other things happening this weekend would be:

Orlando Silent Rave (see a video)
Saturday, May 24th, 5:24PM @ the Green Lawn of Fabulosity

Kite Flying 2.0 with Radio Rickshaw and Greg Barris
Sunday, May 25th 11AM - 5PM @ the Green Lawn on Drunkenness

Zombie March 3.7 with Rich Weirdos and Friends
Saturday, May 24th @ 3PM Park Ave and 5PM Lake Eola

If you know of more cool stuff, leave a comment and we’ll get it listed.

Where’s the Fringe discussion? May 20, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Blogging, Reviews, Newspaper, OrlandoSentinel, bloggingfringe , 3 comments

As it is every year, we post dozens of articles on this site, and everyone reads the Sentinel blog… I love what they’re doing over there, I just wish we had a little of their budget, standing in the community, or the built-in reputation that you get from being a year-round player in this game. If I could pay five seven bloggers, this would be a different world indeed.

As long as you’re comfortable with using your real name (and everyone should be by now), you can go participate in some of the conversation over in Maupin-Land, a magical place where they’ve never heard of video or photos.

The best conversations every year take place at the Attention Must Be Paid blog, and there are invariably a few posts with dozens of comments, like this one entitled “From the Fringe: What’s Good?” (24 comments). Then there’s one that’s pretty much the same idea called “What’s Fab about the Fringe?” (15 comments) — I fail to see the difference between the two posts.

Other posts have garnered between 4 and 6 comments, like the reviews of When Pigs Fly, The UnNaturals, Tod Kimbro, Blues: A Handbook for the Future Homeless, and of course Galapagos, which appears to be this year’s “best kept secret”.

Actually, I’m surprised we don’t have an 80-comment war happening - maybe they’ve lost their edge. We never had it to begin with, it seems.

Sure, the Sentinel claims to have a “Complete Fringe Festival Coverage” page, but all they did here was repurpose the same content they created somewhere else (and often not for Fringe), and they don’t even fit all the reviews on one page.

I know they are working with archaic technology, but if you’ve got the budget to hire 8 people to write about it, can’t you get Danny to post a list of all the reviews on one page?

I had some big plans for this year’s Blogging Fringe, but they had to be put on hold while I figure out how to have a full-time job and be “that guy” at the festival. Also, helping out with the actual Fringe website took a few of my ideas and gave them back to the festival, which is as it should be. With any luck you’ll notice Blogging Fringe coming out of the beta-testing period next year with a critical extra feature that I guarantee the Sentinel and the Weekly wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole: publicly editable pages for all the shows so we can have all the videos, links to reviews editable by anyone so we can have a for-real community site.

Actually, next year, there may be a completely different concept out there, but that depends on several factors and some collaborations I have in the works with Katie Ball. Look for some fun stuff on the horizon.

New Ryan Price Media Blog Syndication Feed May 12, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Site News, Blogging, Podcasts , add a comment

I recently tried to sign up for a service to get my feed syndicated, and they complained about my Flickr photos and daily links entries that only appear in the RSS feed - they said entries with repetitive titles feel like spam for their users - I can sympathize. When you’re looking at the blog, my links and photos appear in the sidebar, but on RSS, I am aggregating a bit.

Therefore, I have created a syndication-friendly feed for Ryan Price Media:

RSS Ryan Price Media Blog Entries Only Feed

I also added a link to the Liberatr.net feed in the left-hand sidebar on the blog just to make it more visible. If you’re not currently subscribed to that feed, check it out.

“5 Minute Romance” Follow-up April 27, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Blogging, 5minuteromance , add a comment

Mark Baratelli asks:

Saw your podcast post re: lady rap and your experience with the puppet festival. What was the outcome of that?

The outcome with Heather was sort of that she was too busy at the time to listen to hours and hours of podcasts, and the memory of it sort of came back to me recently when I thought about writing this blog. I don’t know if she ever listened to any of the shows, but it was a good example about how this blogging stuff is not always good at making first impressions.

I was referencing your (Lady Raptastic) show because it’s not the sort of thing that I myself got into after listening to it once, you know? You’ve got so many episodes, where does one begin to introduce someone to a new universe?

This new media stuff is hard to digest sometimes, I think I am trying to start a meme.

I actually just tried to call Mark so I could record his initial thoughts about the 5 Minute Romance idea, but I got a voicemail. I’d love to get a dialog going here, if anyone wants to chime in, leave a comment or call me.

Also, using the words “5 minute romance” or tagging a post with “5minuteromance” will be a good way to keep this going, I think. I’m going to set up Google Alerts for these and see what happens.

Falling in Love 5 Minutes at a Time April 25, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Blogging, Podcasts, Quotes, Puppets, Trends, BarCamp, BlogOrlando, Friends, Twitter , add a comment

A few years ago at the second Orlando Puppet Festival, I was trying to sell Heather Henson on the idea of my podcasting about the festival becoming official. Needless to say, she’s super-busy running the festival, and we don’t have time to get into all the ins and outs of podcasting, so she asks me to give her a sample. The next time I see Heather I hand her a CD, and she’s grateful for the ability to time-shift her decision-making process.

The following day I see her, she’s a bit frustrated with me, because she says “I put this in my car and nothing happened, you gave me a bad CD!” Oops! Not the case, in fact it was a collection of every podcast I’d released to date - totaling around 80 hours of audio, or about enough to fill 60 regular CDs. “They’re MP3’s” I said, “Normally you’d have to spend hours downloading them all, and I’ve saved you the trouble!” Heather retorts, “But how do I know where to start?” She didn’t like having the entire library of congress and no card catalog (OK, not the ENTIRE library, but still…).

This brings me to an interesting point I haven’t dwelled much on in the past year and a half. How do we begin to introduce people to something like, let’s say Lady Raptastic, which has more than 80 hour-long episodes by itself, not to mention all the other shows Mark Baratelli produces. I suppose the old adage “You’re only as good as your last [whatever]” may come into play here, but that’s just not how it is with blogs and most podcasts.

I was having a conversation with someone at BarCamp about this very subject. She was getting into blogging based on a few pokes by her friends, and she was worried about writing something relevant. I told her “The magic of blogging doesn’t happen in an instant, you sort of fall in love 5 minutes at a time.”

I don’t really know where else to go from here, but suffice it to say there will likely be a “part 2″ of this post, and perhaps more. I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’d especially like to see what the 200+ attendees of BlogOrlando have to say about the subject.

For Post’s Sake! April 23, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, News, Blogging, Orlando, Links, Drupal, Events, floridacreatives, Likemind.orl, OrlandoScene, Friends, Petentials, PopSci , add a comment

Feeling like I haven’t blogged in a while, so here are some things that have happened.

I saw (and played a bit at) an awesome marathon show by marc. with a c. on Saturday at Stardust. I used to be in the band, and I remain a fan. Marc just released his latest album, Linda Lovelace for President, on Amazon MP3, official plastic + DVD due out this summer.

We had a super-awesome Florida Creatives Happy Hour last night - HUGE thanks to all the first-timers, and of course our repeat offenders. If you haven’t seen or registered for the new site yet, surf on over and create a group, get organized, or otherwise try to toss some useful information in there.

Went to an inaugural Refresh Central Florida and Orlando PHP group (seperately). Refresh may or may not be the “tech association” that everyone has been hububbing about - there was talk of turning it into a “United Arts for Geeks”, supporting local groups and individuals. Actually, I was thinking of using United Arts as a channel to have a Florida Creatives professional grant that gets specified in all the same ways the regular UA grants go, just sponsored by us.

Things have been going gangbusters for pet dating site Petentials.com in the last few weeks our US ranking for Alexa is hovering around 100K (we’re more like 400K globally). We’re currently on the second page of Google for “Internet Pets”, but not too high for “pet dating”, hence the googlebombing you may or may not want to participate in… ha!

We’re planning a downtown Orlando photowalk as part of an episode for OrlandoScene.TV - this will be either May 10th or 11th, barring weather, number of RSVPs and other factors. Bring your SLR and your eyes. We’ll be doing interviews with photographers and linking to photosets and whatnot. The idea is to get a little co-promotion on, and get a hold of some much-needed production stills for Orlando Scene. In the AXIS Mag article, well, globe with a network cable… yikes.

Did I mention the kick-ass Drupal meetup we had last week? That was a fun time. I signed up to talk about Drupal Theming with Zen and… I think Views sometime this summer, but I know for certain that our next meetup will be held May 17th in Maitland. Check the Florida Drupal Group page for more info.

Ah, let’s not forget Likemind - we ARE still doing that - now we’re back at Panera Bread by Lake Eola. The next one of those should be May 16th. I have a picture of that somewhere… check the Ryan Price and the Media feed for those bonus Flickr pics you get in there from time to time.

I’m sure I’m missing lots and lots and lots. I have been SO busy lately.

BTW, over at Bonnier (the makers of PopSci) we’re hiring a MySQL Admin. If you are an experienced database administrator, or you have several years of experience with MySQL, send us an email.

P.S. I almost forgot! If you like the movie Clue, Improv Comedy, theatre, mystery, games, or if you’re my friend then you MUST MUST go and see “Murder We Wrote” over at Rollins College this weekend. YOU WILL THANK ME.

Blogging Fringe 2008 April 15, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Site News, Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Events, Trends, Web Sites, Contributors, OrlandoScene, open source , 2 comments

My Friends,

As you all know, I’ve done this Blogging Fringe thing for the past two years. Sadly, this year looks like I’ll be pulled in more directions than ever before. I’ve been up until 2AM every night for weeks on end and I’m not sure when this will stop.

At the same time, I really love the opportunities the Fringe Festival presents to show off some great groups in Orlando and Internationally, and introduce the world to our potential.

At this point I have received dozens of press releases from faithful producers who would love a mention on the blog. I’d love to contact them, conduct interviews, post them to the site, get everyone excited and oh so much more, but that’s not going to happen.

Some of you have contributed time to this project before, others are simply friends, but you are all tied to the theatre community and you have proven your interest in making our community something special.

My plan for Blogging Fringe this year is to write a small number of posts on my personal blog and have them automatically re-posted to BloggingFringe.com, and I’m going to open that up to everyone in the world. All the content on the site will be release under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone will be free to re-post and re-mix the work in any medium for non-commercial purposes This includes all archived content on the site as well.

Getting your content posted is simple. We’ll agree on a keyword, something like “bloggingfringe”, or “Orlando Fringe”, something you will only write on your blog if you’d like the content to be seen, and those posts will be re-posted with a link back to your blog. An example of this is on Liberatr.net where all the posts link to the original home instead of inside the site.

This project has never been about my own personal gain - I’ve sunk hundreds (thousands?) of dollars of my money into creating an environment for patrons and artists to have a conversation, but I believe I’ve fallen short of the mark up until now. Beth will be the first person to say that the Fringe website is not the place she’d like this conversation to happen - that’s one great thing about a site like ours.

All the editorial content on Blogging Fringe - the reviews, videos, audio podcasts, will no longer be called Blogging Fringe, but instead Ryan Price Media, Orlando Scene TV and Florida Creatives. These three websites will just be other first-class citizens of the community like anyone else in the world. If I end up being too busy to post many videos, podcasts or blogs, that will show, because they’ll be lost in the ocean of posts created by the blogging Fringe Faithful.

If I have to I’ll paint the administrator password to Blogging Fringe on a canvas and submit the artwork to Visual Fringe. That’s how open this should be. Anna, what’s the entry fee again?

More news on exactly how to get your blogs re-posted to a public, highly visible website for free coming soon. I hope the Fringe itself, the Orlando Weekly, Elizabeth Maupin, Orlando Arts Blog and others will be proud to include their blogs in the list, because the point is visibility, not exclusivity.

The contents of this email are posted at bloggingfringe.com/2008/04/15/blogging-fringe-2008/ in order to make this information as public as I possibly can. If you’d like to contribute, you can start by posting a link to your blog in the comments! All serious submissions (and some not so serious) will be accepted.

Peace,
Ryan Price

321-441-3964
BloggingFringe.com
FloridaCreatives.com
OrlandoScene.TV

Welcome Back, Old Media March 13, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Markteting, Blogging, Podcasts, Reviews, Trends, Web Sites, PopSci, Magazine , add a comment

Here’s a quick follow-up to last night’s post.

Earlier today, Ryan Block asked:

Why should I be concerned? People aren’t coming to Engadget to read about gadgets from 2006, or 1996, or 1896 — they’re coming to read about what’s going on today. Still, I love that PopSci, so this is gravy!

Ryan is absolutely right. In fact, he’s pointed out to me that Engadget does not fill the same void as PopSci. People aren’t going to his site for the archive, but rather, the very latest and greatest, and so much so that most of the content on Engadget is exclusive and they are the first ones to post about it. They could probably delete all of their archives older than 3 years and nobody would be able to tell.

Mr. Block also loves that PopSci gravy, which means that it’s likely the audience can see those two sites as separate flavors and sample a little of column A, and a little… well, you get it.

I also like how Ryan responded to my post within 9 hours of my writing it. Maybe if I drop Megan Miller’s name in here a few times, she will notice it in her Google Alerts too and come check out the blog.

Actually, I really like what Megan Miller of PopSci has been doing with the 5-minute projects on the site. There is certainly some room for improvement, but she mentioned in this week’s podcast that PopSci is working with Instructables on these videos, though she didn’t say in what capacity.

Mmmm, meta-journalism, hot and fresh! I really feel like I’ve been writing a story about the story of PopSci these last few days. Both in my Twitter stream with Etan asking about the particulars of my new job, and Jeremy direct messaging me as I drove to the office this morning, and now these past few days on my blog. I’m not the story here, the magazine is, and Megan Miller is, and Jonathan Coulton, and Bonnier, a family company. As are Eric and Seth and Sway, and also the folks over at PingVision. I haven’t told the whole story, nor is it in the scope of these blogs to attempt to tell that whole story, just a story around the story.

Old Media, Welcome to New Media Land

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Markteting, Blogging, Podcasts, Reviews, Trends, Web Sites, PopSci, Magazine , 4 comments

OR “How the battle became a collaboration”.

To the Editors of Popular Science:

You win.

Actually, I’m not a quitter, so I’ll say this: I’ve decided that instead of being “versus” each other, some of you Old Media types (can I say Traditional Media? thanks) actually care about your audience. Therefore, we are actually on the same side, you and me. That’s why today, I changed the name of my blog to “Ryan Price and the Media”. The arc of my story is changing, Act II is beginning (but please wait until the pops are two seconds apart).

Aside, to blog readers: Yes, I now work for a big media company: Bonnier Corporation. Dozens of magazines, or more accurately now Brands or Communities, and that’s just in the US. Potential for the big nasty side of media to show itself. However, as our Director of eMedia Howard was pointed out, “Bonnier is a family company, very different from a publicly traded business”. He was quick to point out the differences, and I was quick to believe him.

Back to you PopSci. You have been around for hundreds of years, and if you continue on your current path, you’ll be around for hundreds more. You’ve got a great formula working for you, and I have faith you’ve got the chemistry know-how to achieve the always-coveted, yet rarely achieved Activated Complex state. (sorry, that’s the only thing I remember from Chem I).

Let’s take a look at your assets:

First, and most importantly, you’ve got you’re audience. Not only your current subscribers to the print edition, or the folks that pick up a glossy when they’re traveling or when a pretty picture catches their eyes, but your modern-day audience. RSS subscribers, Google searchers, Diggers, Podcast listeners, Makers, Engineers and people who just want to sound smart at cocktail parties. You understand them all, and your understanding is only getting better as you experiment with new media (the content types, not the buzzword) and use your hundreds of years of publishing experience to deliver an experience that the smaller publications used to dream about (and in many cases you’re still eating their lunch).

That’s right. You’re a contender on the Internet, but you’ve got a hidden advantage. You’ve announced that some time soon, you will be opening your entire back catalog of Popular Science archives to the public (it is to the public, right?). Either way, no Engadget or even the castle-dwellers in Massachussets can claim over a hundred years of back catalog. Hell, few entities on the planet have such a rich offering.

Ryan Block and Chris Anderson should be very very concerned.

If you can continue taking advantage of modern advances in Media distribution (and I have to say you’re maybe one of the most advanced magazines I’ve seen in this area), your Coliseum will never fall into ruin, your Pompeii never covered with ashes.

Smart moves you’ve made include hiring Jonathan Coulton to be your Troubador, creating a podcast that both captivates and informs me and countless others every week, hiring bloggers to keep fresh hot steamy Science articles on your home page, having great SEO, and hiring me to maintain it all, ha ha! (I work for Popular Science, but I promise you this blog post is completely unsolicited, I only started three days ago)

Really, your organization is one to be looked up to in this time of transition, when many print publications are stopping the presses and hoping for bluer skies. I’ve been following my former enemy The Media very closely for the last several years, and I must say that you and I are enemies no longer, in more than one way.

I wish you the best, and I hope that I can ride your coattails to a new and exciting Land called New Media. I am honored to bask in your wizened glow.

Peace,
Ryan Price
New Hire, Drupal Developer
Bonnier Corp. and PopSci.com