Today I finally crossed the long-elusive 3000 subscribers mark on New Music Strategies. I’m very happy about that.

My site New Music Strategies has been going for a good couple of years now. Nearly three, I think. Slowly, over that time, I’ve been building readership.

I don’t look at the stats that often, but there’s usually between 500 and 700 unique visitors a day, which I’m pretty pleased with.

But the metric that I’ve always been most interested in is the number of subscribers to the blog. People who think what I say is interesting enough to get it delivered to them in their feed reader. I was delighted when I hit the 2,500 mark back in May - and I’m thrilled to have finally passed the 3,000 mark today.

So I thought I’d note the occasion on my personal blog where the target is a much more modest 200 readers.

You can subscribe to New Music Strategies here. I wrote an article about RSS feeds here, where I called it “the most useful technology to come about since the invention of email”.

If you’re new to reading blogs through a feed reader, then I’d recommend using Google Reader. It’s really simple and easy to use - and it will transform your web experience.

Hooray!

I did a radical de-friending exercise on Facebook last night. I went through the list of people I’m connected to and realised it was far too long, and that it made the site less than useful.

Unfortunately, I was a little over-zealous. There were some people who were kind of attached to being my friend - and one or two people that I removed in error.

If that’s you, then I apologise - and I have drafted the following letter in response to the couple of complaints that I have received:

Hi,

Apologies for that - I’ve been doing a big clearout of friends in MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and a couple of other social networks. They’ve become unmanageable simply because I’m connected to so many people.

I did the same a while back with Twitter - going down from following 500 people to following 5. I’ve crept back up again to about 25, but I’m trying to keep the information flow light.

My criteria was people I work with, people I’m related to, and people I go and have a drink with. That’s pretty much it. That drops me down to 80-odd from the 400+ I was at on Facebook.

Unfortunately, unlike Twitter, ‘friendship’ can only happen two ways on Facebook. There are lots of people who follow me on Twitter that I don’t follow. But on Facebook, you can only connect reciprocally. If I don’t follow you, you can’t follow me.

I had a feeling this purge of mine would step on a few toes, and I certainly don’t mean to offend anyone. My expectation is that over the next few weeks, I’ll end up re-adding a bunch of people (though I’ll be more selective this time around - I had people added who were complete and utter strangers to me).

But to be honest, I don’t actually use Facebook that much, except to check in and run down the list of people I know and see what they’re up to - then grumble that they’re not on Twitter, which is so much better at that sort of thing.

Then I look at their photos, and grumble that they’re not using Flickr, which is so much better at that sort of thing.

Then I look at the two groups that I’m a member of, and grumble that they’re not self-contained online communities, blogs or Ning sites - or at the very least, Yahoo or Google Groups, which are so much better at that sort of thing.

And finally, I look at my Inbox and grumble that these people haven’t sent their messages to my email, which is so much better at that sort of thing.

I go to Facebook because I have to - because that’s where people are. And every now and then on all my social networks, I’ll do a radical pruning. But just as in gardening, sometimes when you do a radical pruning, you inadvertently chop off a flower.

In this case, that was you - and I’m adding you back to rectify this error. Sorry to signal any sort of rejection. It wasn’t at all intentional or directed at you.

Delighted to have you as my Facebook friend.

If this applies to you, please by all means go back to Facebook and re-add me. It wasn’t a personal slight. It was just a spring clean. Talk to you soon.

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Hard at work

Professor Tim Wall and I quite often write together. Usually, I’ll go to his house - a good hour’s journey on two buses, plus waiting and walking. All up, 3 hours commuting, interspersed with cups of coffee, long and interesting chats about lofty-minded things, and short bursts of typing.

Working that way, we tend to get at best about 4 hours of actual writing done in a day, what with a break for lunch and everything.

We’re working on something together at the moment, so this time I suggested that rather than sit in the same room together, we use Skype video, document sharing and various other bits of online trickery, and see if we can’t get some work done that way.

Apart from some wireless router glitching I’m experiencing, it worked absolutely brilliantly. We were able to work together just as well, I got to have a bit of a lie-in, we could see each other while we worked (normally, facing our respective computers means we are in the same room together, but not face to face) and in some respects, it was a better experience all round.

My plan is to roll this out more generally so that I never have to go to work.

New Music Strategies has been offline for some days now. I’m having difficulty getting the internet to believe that it’s back where it should be, and that it should stop redirecting to New Music Management - a handy holding spot where it resided temporarily while I did The Big Server Migration of 2008.

Not that I think it’s particularly important in the grand scheme of things, nor am I twiddling my thumbs waiting for it to come back on so that I have something to do… but there are people who read it, and some of them are starting to notice its continued absence.

Took me ages to build up to 700 visitors a day and over 2,500 RSS subscribers. Hoping I haven’t lost too much of that in the meantime - but there’s pretty much nothing I can do except wait for support people to get back to me with more information.