Musician Exchange List

I've been wanting to do this for a while and now found a simple way to get it done. What this is, is a spreadsheet of musicians who are willing to work with other musicians to help them finish a project. There is a simple form to fill out and then your name and information is added to the spreadsheet for anybody to view here.

To get signed up just fill out this form and get your name on the list. If there are any other details or any other ideas for this feel free to let me know. I'm hoping that alot of people can benefit from this.

Thank you for the input.

Brian

I'm worried about your email addy being exposed on the web, Brian. Aside from that I think it's a great idea. Maybe member names or URLs at social networking sites might be a better way to go, there.

As someone who has had to ditch scores of email addresses since the early-mid 90s, I'm painfully aware of the spam issue. And one real fast way to get the spambots attention is to have an email address on the web.

One thing you could do without too much effort, I suspect, would be to break email addies up into the username and the domain and keep them in separate columns. That would completely flummox any spambot. Humans would still be able to use the email addresses. (Human spam target collectors have probably all but disappeared, since spambots work 24/7 for free and don't make typos.)

(If you were to get fancy, later, you could even create a javascript that would run on page rendering in the user's browser to produce a human-usable-clickable email address from the info in the spreadsheet. Spambots -- so far -- don't actually render pages, they just prowl through the code looking for the familiar username@domain.name formatted strings.)

Or, you might want to use a social team/grouping utility, like they use for environmental and political volunteer groups.

That's a good idea. I haven't been too worried about spam because I use Gmail and they have a fairly good spam detection service that keeps my inbox clean. Granted, I do get a couple hundred spam message a week but I don't ever have to see them. And any email that I solicit I add to my addresses so that I make sure to get them. But I'll try to re-arrange things so that it will go in like that. Thanks for the input.

I think I got it fixed. If you want to give it a try go ahead. If you want to test it and don't want to be on the list I can delete you from it also.

That should do it, Brian, I'm thinking.

I'd add my stuff but I don't even seem to be able to sit down to collaborate with myself often enough.

I sort of have that same problem. But I was finding that I was using the time I wanted to work on my stuff to help other people with the projects they have going. Maybe I'll find somebody to help me now and I'll get something productive done.

Before I started hanging out in this forum, I was going through a nasty downturn in productivity. Where I'd been writing a couple songs a month (not necessarily first book keepers, mind you ) in the 90s, I was down to a couple songs a year for a couple of years.

And it didn't happen overnight, but, since last fall, the productivity has improved considerably, back far closer to 'normal.'

So, I don't know if my feedback or general observations have helped anyone else -- but putting in the thought/effort seems to have helped me...

hehehe. did it

I hope you're not re-inventing the wheel with this. There are a lot of collaboration sites popping up. Just google "music collaboration". I'm surprised Harmony Central hasn't started one. Also, I can't access google apps from work.

I've been watching esession, which has free services as well as pro contacts. You don't have to pay anything to get file transfer, project tracking, web chat, etc. I haven't done a collab on it yet because the first version was slow and the support model undeveloped, but they just got up a forum and the site is moving faster now, so maybe they've resolved a few issues.

I've come the conclusion that I have to give up the one-man bedroom band idea and get some help or I'll never finish anything. Or, um, start anything, lately.