Mapping musicians

I like maps. They used to be fairly crap on-line until Google came along and showed everyone how it should be done. Not only that, but they made it easy for people to build apps on top of the map. Years ago there was a site called Frappr that let any group of people put pins on a map to show where they all were. This is useful for any on-line community to make it easier for people to meet up in the flesh. That site is long gone.

Recently I found Musomap that does something similar, but it aimed at musicians who want to find local people to collaborate with. It's still fairly small, with just over 1000 members. That means many areas are still sparsely populated. The site features messaging and chat facilities. I used the latter to chat to the site creator 'Kahne'. He's eager to talk to people about how they want the site to develop and I have said I am happy to help where I can. I've already persuaded a few people to join, including several members of the Six String Bliss community.



A site with similar aims is Fandalism, but that doesn't do maps. That really went viral and now has around 500,000 users. I assume that people are getting something out of it, but I haven't so far. It would be great to see Musomap take off in a similar way, but I don't know what it will take and if it can cope with that many people. Scaling is tricky and can cause a flood of updates that will overwhelm people unless they can filter it.

I'm still on various other 'muso wanted' sites as well. I spoke to someone a while back about a blues band, but nothing has come of it yet. I'm keeping my options open. My little pub acoustic jam session has started up again after a summer break. There were four of us there this week, including a bassist. I also have another Six String Bliss album project to work on. I need to start planning that.

Oh, and just last night I did a quick recording of a cool Paul Gilbert guitar lesson. It's a very rough recording, but it captures what I was doing. I didn't quite get the riff right, but that makes it my own thing!