Tag Archives: women

The Who, In Concert

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Not too old to rock and roll.

Mike and I were lucky enough to have seats on the floor at Wednesday night’s Who concert at US Airways Center (formerly America West Arena) in downtown Phoenix. It was an amazing experience.

First of all, the last time we saw The Who, John Entwistle was still alive. We saw the concert at Shea Stadium (I think; you’d think I’d remember something like that), which is a huge venue. Most of the rock concerts I’ve been to have been in big venues: Madison Square Garden (where I always managed to be in the Yellow “nose-bleed” section) for Elton John and led Zeppelin (in the 1970s) , Nassau Coliseum (for Styx and Yes), Shea Stadium (for the Rolling Stones, The Who, and Elton John and Eric Clapton (together, in the 1990s)), and Giants Stadium (for Pink Floyd, Division Bell tour, 1990s). US Airways Center is smaller than Nassau Coliseum (I think), so seeing these legends of rock and roll in such a “tiny” place was a real treat.

Second of all, I was among the youngest people in the place. The average age of concert-goers was approaching 50. Lots of balding heads and beer bellies and overweight women. Mike and I fit right in. There were exceptions, of course. One guy apparently had his son (or perhaps grandson?) with him. And there were a half dozen geeky 20-year-olds who became somewhat of an annoyance by bouncing along with the music past the floor sections, only to be pushed back repeatedly by security. (I would have kicked them out after the second incursion.)

Our seats were 20-30 rows back from the stage. Very nice seats. There was an aisle in front of the row in front of us, so it wasn’t as if we had to look over a sea of heads. Mike did good.

We arrived just in time for the opening act, The Tragically Hip. I can understand how the word “tragic” got into this band’s name. It was a tragedy for us to arrive in time to hear them. It was also a tragedy that they played 5 or 6 songs, all of which sounded pretty much the same to me. And the lyrics:

You’re not the ocean.

You’re not even close.

Huh?

The lead singer had some kind of weird dance move that isn’t exactly original — Cab Calloway was doing the same thing back in the 1930s a hell of a lot better. And I guess he didn’t understand that the thing he was shouting into was a live microphone, because he found it necessary to scream most of the lyrics.

You’re not the ocean.

You’re not even close.

Yeah. Whatever.

The Tragically Hip exited the stage amidst applause. The roadies came out and started working on the stage. The people who had been watching the opening act, went out to get beer and nachos. (Yes, nachos; very strange for an east coast girl.) The smart people who knew that the opening act would suck started filing in. The place filled up. They were playing recorded music over the loudspeakers. They were in the middle of Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks when the music died out, the hall went dark, and Daltrey and Townshend took the stage with their band (drummer Zak Starkey, keyboardist John Bundrick, guitarist Simon Townshend, and bassist Pino Palladrino).

Endless WireEveryone was immediately on their feet. And we stayed there for the next two hours, sitting only when the band played a track from their new CD. We were all there to hear the old stuff and they didn’t disappoint.

They opened with I Can’t Explain. And for guys in their 60s, they looked pretty damn good. Daltrey is in excellent shape — he looks like he works out. Even Townshend, who never stuck me as the kind of guy overly interested in appearance, looked good. The show was great, full of energy and the “trademarked” moves Who fans have come to expect: Daltrey’s swinging of the mike (he’s probably the only performer who still needs a mike with a wire) and Townshend’s “windmill.”

The concert lasted about two hours, including a 20-minute encore. They played Teenage Wasteland, Pinball Wizard (leading off a Tommy medley), My Generation, Behind Blue Eyes, and more than my addled brain can remember. (If you were at the concert, please use the Comments link to fill in my memory gaps. You can also read a review here.)

The show was great and kept my attention for the entire time — which is something unusual (I think I suffer from ADD symptoms sometimes). I was energized, dancing and singing at the top of my lungs. (Don’t worry; no one heard me above the sound of the band.)

But the thing I came away with from the experience is this: I’m not too old to rock and roll — and neither are the two surviving members of The Who.

Earning Money with Your Blog

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Without trashing it up.

Before I dive into this topic, I want to make it clear that I really hate the way some Web sites and blogs are so covered with advertising that it appears that the only reason the site/blog exists is to get visitors to click advertising links and earn money for the site/blog owner. You know what sites I’m talking about. It’s pretty obvious when advertisements take up more space in your browser window than the actual content you came to read.

(I’m actually involved with one of these sites. It’s a long story that’s still evolving. I’ll tell you more about it in a future article here. But my failure to provide the URL in this note should give you the idea that I’m not very proud of it.)

All that said, if you publish a Web site or blog and you’re not doing anything to monetize it, you’re leaving money on the table. And that point really hit home when I read that one of the bloggers I follow makes over $15,000 a month from Adsense revenue alone. Sheesh.

It seems that I need to walk a fine line between keeping my site free of advertisements (100% content per page, no revenue) and trashing it up with all the affiliate program and other advertisements I can get my hands on (25-50% content per page, some revenue).

After all, this site’s goal is not to make money. Sure, one goal is to promote my books and other work and support readers so they buy more books. And to attract new readers who buy books. There’s money there. But my other goals are to sound out about the things on my mind and take notes I can consult in the future about the things I do and see.

But can you imagine how much time I could spend doing, seeing, and blogging if my site brought in $15K/month?

(To be fair, you must consider the costs associated with maintaining such a site. If only 1% of a site’s visitors react to an advertisement by clicking on it — and that’s probably a high estimate — imagine how many visitors you need to crank up $15K of Adsense earnings. We’re talking thousands of page hits an hour. Those visitors eat up bandwidth at an alarming rate. Bandwidth costs money. So a bunch of that revenue is probably eaten up by hosting costs.)

One of the things that drives me is my own feeling towards advertising-heavy sites. I find them distasteful and I avoid them. That makes me think that if I filled my site with ads, people might use that as an excuse to stay away. Less visitors should mean less revenue, right?


Well, last week I started integrating Adsense ads into my sites. I’m trying to do it tastefully, with ads in various positions, depending on the site and the type of page. You may have noticed them. For the most part, they’re near the bottom of pages — which is not the recommended location to get clicks. wickenburg-az.com has a link unit across the top of the page, right beneath the header image. It’s color coordinated, so it fits in. There are text links at the bottom of single pages (that’s a page with a single article and all of its comments) on this site, and other text links in the sidebar for the Home and Category pages. wickenburg-az.com has a few image ads, which really concern me — some of them can be really tacky, with flashing graphics and obnoxious images. (I’m personally offended by some of the graphics in dating ads, like the ones you might see on Slate.com. They’re using women to sell sex.)

I also set up Adsense channels, which is another topic I need to write about here. They help me see where the revenue is coming from when I look at Adsense reports. Sure enough, my revenue stream took a big jump when I added the ads.

LinkShare Referral PrgToday, I set up LinkShare, an affiliate program that enables me to display all kinds of ads. Unlike Adsense, however, people have to buy something after clicking the link to earn me money. The percentages are higher, but what are the chances of someone actually clicking and buying?

With LinkShare, you choose the companies you want to represent and apply. I chose a bunch that I thought would interest my blog’s visitors. A bunch automatically accepted me. One declined me, but when I questioned them, they said it was an error and they approved me. Another declined me because I have no dedicated shopping areas on my site. In other words, they want sites with lots of ads. I’m waiting for a bunch of others.

Then I set up the WordPress Ad Rotator plugin to display a single 125×125 pixel “button” near the bottom of the Sidebar on all pages of this site. I had to manually copy and paste the code for every single ad I wanted to use. It took a long time and the task was boring and tedious. But it does display the clickable ads.

I could get fancy and set up the rotations based on categories, but I’m keeping it simple right now. I just want to see if this actually does earn revenue.

So that’s where I stand right now: ads from Adsense and LinkShare.

I’ll report on my progress when I start getting some reports from LinkShare. I’ll also put together that Adsense Channels article one of these days. I think it’s a great tool for seeing which pages and types of ads work best.

RSS Summaries

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A reader chastises me.

The other day, while writing about the Reading Options in WordPress, I decided to experiment with this blog. I togged the settings so only summaries of my entries would be sent to people accessing with RSS readers.

Understand that I don’t use an RSS reader. I surf the old fashioned way, with a Web browser. I don’t surf that often and I don’t follow any one particular blog or site. So it’s never been an issue for me.

But for the book, I had to understand what this WordPress feature did. So I toggled it to the Summaries setting, downloaded a feed reader, and looked at the result. What I saw was a list of 10 or so posts in a window. I’d click a post title and the beginning of the post would appear in a window pane beneath the list. There was a link at the end indicating that there was more; clicking the link brought me to my Web site.

This seemed a logical way to release content via RSS. After all, didn’t I want visitors to come to the site where they could read not just the articles but the comments? And see all the pictures that came with the piece?

Dori of Wise Women didn’t think so. She commented on my “Stand Up for Your Principles” piece to stand up for her principles: that RSS feeds for blogs should include the entire content.

Whew! No problem. This morning, I remembered what I did to create the summaries (I did have to remember something I learned about 2 whole days ago!) and toggled the option back to its original settings. I just checked it with my feed reader and it’s working fine.

But this makes me curious. I’d like to know more from the folks who use an RSS feed reader to follow this blog. Here are a few questions; I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to answer a few of them in the Comments for this post.

  • How often do you check the site? Regularly? (If so, I’m flattered to be on your list!)
  • Why do you prefer a news reader to a Web browser?
  • Does your news reader display formatted text and graphics?
  • Which reader do you use? On what computer platform?
  • Would you like to share any advice for people considering using a reader or for bloggers like me who aren’t fully aware of the benefits?

Although I’m a technical person and write about computer technology for a living, I made a decision long ago to concentrate on only those technologies that I use or write about. There’s just too much out there to learn it all — and still have a life that doesn’t revolve around a computer! As a result, my knowledge of computer technology is spotty, with expertise on certain topics balanced by sheer ignorance of others. (Ignorance is bliss, they say.)

Perhaps its time to give the RSS feed reader topic a bit more attention. What do you think?

PostScript: I just used my RSS reader to check out the other blogs that were included in it. It appears that none of them include the full text of the article. What’s going on here? Perhaps that’s why I discarded the idea of using a reader when I first tried it about two years ago? Because you had to go to the Web site anyway to read the article? It seems that, in many instances, the reader adds an extra step to following blogs. If you’re commenting on this piece, please comment on that, too.