The Soapbox Archives:
"Hi,
One has to go to the individual dance venue, which is very time
consuming and error-prone.
Can you correct?"
I know you do your best but the Calendar section seems to omit
many events that various dance venues are having.
This sort of letter usually incites me into writing a response, and it only took about 10 minutes to type, but the response is really intended for the dance organizers and I will forward an edited note to the appropriate dance organizer.
What I've done is build the biggest social dance website and made it so people *want* to come here for their dance information. The dance promoters should want to be listed and should be tripping over themselves to get their information to me. Their competitors figured it out a long time ago. Some of these dance venues need to get a clue.
You can help. If you have a favorite dance venue, tell them that they need to get their venues listed on my website. Tell them to check my website and send me updates. Tell them it's free. Tell them that I've had up to 25,000 *different* visitor come by every month so they can get access to every one of those paying customers.
Can I do better? Probably. However, it should be noted that I make no money off my website. I don't prosper when a dance venue gets more business. It doesn't help me if more people choose to attend a specific venue. It is in the best interest of those dance venues to make it easier for me to publicize their venue's new information so they get more paying customers; there's no real incentive for me to chase these people down if the venues don't care to make the most of the *BIGGEST* social dance website in Boston, New England, and around the country. I'm already spending a lot of my free time updating my website. Oh, don't forget that I'm *still* maintaining the Tango website, too, even though I stopped dancing Tango about 10 years ago.
I'm always glad to hear from my readers and I'll read every suggestion that they have. I'm happy for new ideas to improve my website. However, adding more of my free time to a non-paying activity is not one of them. I want to keep my girlfriend to keep happy. :-P
And the response was:
"I was thinking of ...[someone who will be notified that this editorial had them in mind].
All I can say is that these venues are flat-out dumb not to send you their event listings.
They are clueless and do not appreciate you.
Yours is the bestmaybe only Boston area dance website.
Regards,
D."
"It's better for your diet if you eat with chopsticks."
After a few seconds of contemplation, I had to agree.
When you spend more time trying to hurt someone else's business than you do trying to improve your own business, then you're obsessed.
If you ever order any of his books, make sure to get him to autograph your copy. His memoirs of his Boston Pops days, "Real Men Don't Rehearse", are hilarious.
If your company is offering old computer equipment for cheap and they're not upgrading the existing equipment to something better, then it's probably a good idea to stand back and ask if there's something wrong.
For instance, if there are a surplus of 17" LCD monitors and no one's upgraded to a 19" monitor, it may be that the pile of 17" LCD monitors are the ones that were tossed back to the IT department because they weren't not working correctly. It doesn't take much of a flicker in the display to give people headaches over time. Ask if you can try out the monitor before buying. Even if the money is going to charity, you'll still feel ripped off if you're just going to toss out your new purchase. And you don't want to get stuck with the disposal of the equipment; places like Staples will charge you $10 to unload old monitors on them.