Arising out of my expeience trying to find a session when business takes me to a different city, I have started a MODERATED google map that will locate all the sessions that people tell me about. The point of being moderated is that I want to keep the last updated dates accurate and prevent people joking around and/or spaming via the map.
Yes, I could find lists of sessions here and at thesession.org, but not knowing the local area I didn’t know which would be near my hotel and which would be hours away. I thought a map with all of them on it would be handy so I didn’t have to search each one manually via Google or whatever.
There’s only the three sessions that I attend on the map at the moment, but you can check it out at:
There is an entire forum here at C&F about where to find sessions. Wouldn’t it be faster to start there and map that (only where addresses are given, of course)?
Yeah, it would be faster, and I might go ahead and put in sessions that have been entered recently. And also on www.thesession.org.
There comes a point where the information is no longer current as I found out when I did a search for a session near where we were going for vacation. Four or five found, only one still active. Could be the same group just moving from one place to another or something. Also it’s often not clear if the establishment is a bar or a resturant or what.
Then again, even this fresh infor will go stale over time.
What’s worse is that the people who post these sessions on lists do not take responsibility for their posting, and may even be responsible for multiple postings that are all now defunct.
To me, the optimum set-up would involve having individuals provide their email address. They would be allowed to post a session as long as ALL mandatory inputs were provided about a session, including day, time, address. A program could push this info to a Google (or what have you) map. All postings would be deleted in six months from time of original posting. An email would go to the original poster warning them they must repost the session if they want it put back up. That ensures the map is current within six months, and posters are made responsible to maintain it instead of you.
Unfortunately, the problem with using the listings here is that you don’t know if they are current anymore, and they are not in order of locale, but of date posted. I find it confusing… of course, I may just be hopelessly confused… that does color one’s perceptions.
FolkJam.orghttp://www.folkjam.org has a map system for theirs. It centers on your own lacale and lets you choose how wide a radius to look in. Since they have ‘Celtic’ as one of their focal points, it may have just what you are looking for.
This observation is spot on. It takes effort to find sessions in unfamiliar areas, in part because the information is far flung, and largely because so much of it is out of date.
You’ve essentially written the spec document for folkjam.org, but about two years after we got going on it. Six months after a user posts session details we ask them to confirm the post (rather than removing it). We ask three times, and if they don’t respond to any the session is removed from the site’s maps and calendars. It remains in our database and is flagged as having no known good future dates.
I recognize that with ITM the term ‘jam’ as used in our domain name is not very appropriate. We wanted a short domain name, and we are not just about Irish sessions.
You are clearly on the same page that Shawn and I are playing from. I’d love to hear your other thoughts (critical and complimentary) on folkjam.org. Contact me via http://www.folkjam.org/feedback
What is folkjam? I hope it’s not that stuff at the bottom of my running shoes.
I am guessing that this is a for-profit site, as it wants me to “become a member.” Is that correct, or is this a not-for-profit, please-send-a-donation site?
Is there some way that I can specify that I only want to search for “Irish” sessions? A list of bluegrass jam sessions is not of much use to me.
How long has this site been up? I have not heard of it before, and there doesn’t seem to be much activity posted to it (yet).
I assure you it is not, nor is it like Marmite or Vegamite.
The site is free to use, where we cover our costs is in advertising. To search and find sessions on the site you need not sign up. You do need to sign up to post sessions to the site or participate in forums, or if you want us to remember your location for searches between visits. Asking folks to sign up serves a few purposes, including spam containment and allowing people to edit their session, festival and workshop posts later on. There is no charge to sign up, and we don’t send you spammy special offers on magic flutes. If you wish to send a donation, getting ten of our flashy case stickers would be great, and is cheaper than glowing yellow movie popcorn for the family. http://www.folkjam.org/store
Yes and no. If the person who submitted the event did not pick “Irish” as the musical style for the session from the list, then we don’t know it is an Irish session. If they did, yes, you can search specifically for Irish sessions. On the front page, look at the right hand side under the “Musical Style” selection. Pick Irish, and you’ll see a list of any sessions in the “Irish” category near you.
We just celebrated our one year anniversary, so as sites go we are young. In that year over 1000 users have signed up, and we’ve served about 350,000 unique visitors, most of the in the past few months as we’ve picked up growth.
There is quite a lot of activity on the site, but not in the forums (which is where I suspect you were looking). We are not trying to be a forum site - there are plenty of those and they do their job well. Our mission is to connect people in the physical world to play music together.
The activity is in the submission of events, which continues at a good clip. Take a look at recent submissions [1] to the site. You might also peek at our statistics [2], where we have about 450 active, verified, known good in the last six months recurring sessions listed. There are more than that in our database, but we pull them from the stats, maps and calendars if the submitter fails to verify the information. We get about a 15% verification rate (so we remove 15% of our listings every six months as they become inaccurate).
You might also enjoy prodding the world jam map [3].
I am not surprised that this is the first that you have heard of us yet. It it takes a while for musicians (sessioners, pickers and fiddlers alike) to share. We are two guys who love to play music and who write software for a living (at jobs that are unrelated to folkjam). We market the site to the modest degree we can afford, but we really count on word of mouth.
I do appreciate the interest. I’ll monitor this thread and answer other questions you and others may have.
What you get when you boil a few hippies with several litres of sugar
Seriously … whatever it is, it’s got to be easier to use that thesession.org: in this, so get a list of current sessions, you have to open each and everyone, then click into the comments tab … then click twice to go back to the list again.
Okay, FJ, I see the additional Search options on the right hand side, but I would not normally look that far down the page due to all the adds. I guess if you are counting on ads to pay for lunch you can’t afford to put the search options up at the top as part of the first page (?).
I don’t see the problem. I must be missing something. The search option is at the top of the page when I look, and the categories are listed at the top of the left side. Maybe you’re using a different browser? or screen resolution, or something?
And I don’t mind a place having ads, in fact, I’m going to be one of them.
The general keyword search option and the set-location-search option are right at the top, but the by-style search is indeed lower on the right hand side.
It’s all about what fits where, and yes, the ads are an important part. The site takes significant horsepower to run because of all the geospatial math we do (I love saying geospatial, makes me feel smart). And because of that, it needs mid-grade dedicated hosting. We outgrew our $5 a month shared hosting account in less than three weeks.
Lunch? We count on ads to make the monthly ‘you spent how much on that site?’ conversation with our wives easier.
I have a lot of respect for Jeremy and the work he has done to create such a vibrant community at thesession.org. My complaint with the site is the session listings, which are cumbersome to use and listed in the order they were posted. What I want when I travel and look for sessions is to know where the local jams are and when they happen.
I’ll admit we make you slog through Bluegrass and Contra dances to find your ITM when you use the maps and calendars on folkjam. Our solution is imperfect in other ways. We put our effort into making it easy to find local area events and placed less emphasis on the ‘show me all Irish sessions’ type searches. In part because we didn’t know how effectively people would categorize their event posts.
Anyway, I’ve likely said enough on this thread. Thanks for the interest.
Au contraire… or however you spell that… all I had to do was put ‘Irish’ or ‘Ireland’ in the search box and up it came with many. I also used the map to find Dublin (with none listed, and Galway, with 5!!! I am hoping to at least witness one while I’m there next year, and I had no idea I’d find so many in one place… just about any day of the week!! Great!
