Working to a better Future, going over the awesome Past

This last week or so has been pretty interesting, to say the least. We hit over 10,000 unique listeners this week, which was my goal for the month! Hopefully we can shatter that record next month, but for now I'm just happy that listener-ship seems to be trending upwards. I still havent gotten around to adding images or artwork to the main website, but thats mainly because school work has been keeping me from developing the website more than it has been already. I'm still working on getting a promo up both on the stream and on youtube. I suppose I should put that on the Facebook page and the Twitter too, but trying to keep all this social media straight is like, completely impossible.

To explain that image just a little bit, that is the tracking graph for my monthly listeners, but only when I am streaming. That means that any time which the other DJs are responsible for are not reflected by this graph. I wish that I had a way to track all of the listeners regardless of who had control of the stream, but I guess I will have to figure that out over time. For now, this should give a pretty accurate picture of how many people we have listening and for about how long. As you can see, the month is hardly over yet and already I've logged up about 3,000 hours of TTSL (total time spent listening). This counter works similarly to the way one would count man-hours. You listen for three hours and I listen for three hours and the counter will log six hours TTSL. As a basic over-view, thats how that counter works. I think the amount of time spent listening to my music and horrible voice is absolutely fantastic and I never thought it would add up to be as much as it does.

On the side of the planning for the future, I have yet to start designing a club in Second Life for the station, and I'm sort of starting to think that it might be a waste of time to build. Honestly, even when I was playing SL on a normal basis, I was still only there for a few hours at a time and building a support structure in-game would be a pain in the ass. I would need someone to staff the club at all hours of the day, which means I'd really need at least three people for that, then 'd need the active DJ in-game while they're working, and that would cause problems because the game takes a lot of power to run and the stream wouldn't be nearly as high-quality as it should be. All in all, I'm sort of putting Second Life on the shelf for right now. I need to build up some sort of community for the station.

I've been thinking about using some sort of BBS to build people up, but with whats been happening to Duane's website and all I'm not even sure I want to invite that sort of trouble. I have enough problems trying to get people into the channel, and even then they dont stay long because i'm normally away from the computer or working on homework or the website. I wish I could find someone to staff the channel at all times, but for now it's just me.

Speaking about the IRC channel for just a second though, I recently added the link for a web-based IRC client that allows the users to connect to the channel without having to install an IRC client on their computer. It connects them to the right server and channel and still acts as a normal IRC client in that you can still navigate to other channels from my web-client. I also recently installed a trivia bot into the channel to give users something to do while they listen to the radio, but I've recently also found that having the bot running while people are there tends to make it a little hard to talk to each other.

Thats about all the news I've got for right now, but I'll keep you guys posted on the changes coming in the future and hopefully we'll get some real groups into chat sometime! Also, I will be letting everyone know when I get the capability to take live Skype calls on the air again. That is a really fun way to involve the listeners and honestly it's a lot of fun on the DJ's end.

Thanks for listening and keep tuning in~! ^^