Who Knows What Evil Lurks In The Hearts Of Men?

Apparently, it’s no longer The Shadow; instead, it’s Blognoggle, which professes to shadow the top 100 classical music blogs. Blognoggle comes straight from the mind of none other than Jerry Bowles, the editor of Sequenza21.com, a hotbed of contemporary music discussion and just about anything else cutting edge related to classical music (assuming that’s not an oxymoron to begin with)…


According to Jerry Bowles Blognoggle is for the busy and/or uninitiated,

“The premise of blognoggle is basically RSS So You Don’t Have To or RSS for People who Don’t Know What RSS Is,” said Jerry. “Only a small portion of internet users now bother with RSS readers and those that do become quickly overwhelmed by too much information. My hunch is that people who casually browse the web would much rather go to a friendly web page where the most important and freshest posts from the best sources on the topics they’re interested in have already been automatically selected for them to quickly review.”

In essence, Jerry is allowing users to take everything they want from classical music blogs with the least amount of effort and in all likelihood, that’s a winning strategy for the average American internet user. When asked to describe the technobabble title Jerry said,

“Blognoggle is a word I made up to describe a group of blog feeds grouped by topic. I have three so far–classical music, business and politics.”

With Gogglesque appeal, Blognoggle is certainly a catchy little word that’s easy to remember and distribute (if you rearrange the letters you come up with: Blog-n-Goggle). Regardless of how catchy the name is, users will gravitate toward Blognoggle based on whether or not they find it useful.

To that end, Jerry said that he selected the 100 classical music blogs based on amount of web traffic they generate, their influence on the business, and more subjective criteria such as does he personally like it and find it useful. Given Jerry’s success with online ventures so far, his gut instinct is likely an asset.

When asked how he would like to see Blognoggle grow Jerry said,

“My hope is that some young kid with Michael Dell’s money who likes the Blognoggle name and has a cool proprietary meme-tracking program will come along and give me some money to go away.”

How does all of this relate to orchestra management? It has a couple of relevant connection points. First, with the inclusion of Adaptistration among Blognoggle’s 100 it demonstrates that there’s more interest in classical music management beyond the realm of managers. Second, Blognoggle, and to a greater extent Sequenza21.com, are excellent examples of how to identify a market interested in classical music and design a product to harness that interest. In other words, it’s an excellent example of creativity coalescing with need to develop a new audience.

About Drew McManus

"I hear that every time you show up to work with an orchestra, people get fired." Those were the first words out of an executive's mouth after her board chair introduced us. That executive is now a dear colleague and friend but the day that consulting contract began with her orchestra, she was convinced I was a hatchet-man brought in by the board to clean house.

I understand where the trepidation comes from as a great deal of my consulting and technology provider work for arts organizations involves due diligence, separating fact from fiction, interpreting spin, as well as performance review and oversight. So yes, sometimes that work results in one or two individuals "aggressively embracing career change" but far more often than not, it reinforces and clarifies exactly what works and why.

In short, it doesn't matter if you know where all the bodies are buried if you can't keep your own clients out of the ground, and I'm fortunate enough to say that for more than 15 years, I've done exactly that for groups of all budget size from Qatar to Kathmandu.

For fun, I write a daily blog about the orchestra business, provide a platform for arts insiders to speak their mind, keep track of what people in this business get paid, help write a satirical cartoon about orchestra life, hack the arts, and love a good coffee drink.

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