Cul-de-Sac

Cul-de-Sac is:

an online music magazine about the West Midlands. This is a fledgling project and we are hoping to grow in the coming months and years. Cul-de-Sac is designed to be a one-stop resource for music fans in the region, as well as being a vital source of information for people regardless of their geographical position

Cul-de-Sac has the sort of news, album reviews, gig reviews and so on that you’d expect from this sort of music site but with a West Mids slant.

I’m dead pleased to see this spring up, partly because I’m hoping it’ll take a weight off CiB.  When I get emails with local bands’ MySpace pages or gigs/nights/etc listings I’m wary that if I mention one I’d have no reason (other than my own bias) for not mentioning them all.  There are a bunch of sites doing that job better than I ever could.

There’s Live Brum, What’s On In Brum, Birmingham Gig Guide, Birmingham Alive and others for listings. Birmingham Live and The Hearing Aid take care of reviews and again, there’s a few others doing that too.  However, there was a big Cul-de-Sac-shaped hole for news and reviews.  I’ve high hopes for this one.

What might be even more interesting would be for a few of the above-mentioned to find a way of sharing their content somehow.  Just a thought…

Spotted by BiNS.

10 Comments

  2. Hello…the Hearing Aid here…I’d be happy to share any of the rubbish that I write with anyone. If you want to copy and paste from my site, just go ahead. It’s all about the music. If anyone has a more sophisticated idea (maybe a written version of the Hype Machine for example)post your thoughts here.

    Have a lovely weekend.
    X

  3. when you say ‘find ways of sharing your content’ do you mean beyond the bog standard rss feeds that all of us provide ? any ideas would be more than welcomed !

    one thing which has been raised is that it would actually be very beneficial if those of us running our listings websites could come together to agree on a standard schema which would allow venues & promoters an easy way to – for example – enter all their listing details into one .csv file (using excel or whatever) which they could then upload to all the co-operating listings sites in the club, saving them loads of time & also benefitting our sites by having more content, because the content providers have more time etc.

    i’ve been meaning to email josh & jonny for ages to start the discussion on such a thing, but right now i’ve not even found time to send them the email, let alone actually implement anything which came out of it…

  4. >enter all their listing details into one .csv file (using excel or whatever)

    Good idea — Google Docs spreadsheets can be a set up to have a web-facing form input.

    Even if it wasn’t a direct copy of your DB structure it could be a central point you could all draw info from.

  5. Perhaps a single form for promoters and venues which would post the data to the respective websites using cUrl or something similar. This could also post to upcoming and evdb. Sites would need to share their venue ids and organiser ids so that it worked properly.

  6. it’d need to be done in such a way that if different sites didn’t all include the same info fields (for example, i generally don’t publicise the promoter at all, let alone give them a separate field !) it’d still work; we’d also need to take account of different sites ‘gaining’ different venues at different times (so would consequently end up having different ids).

    i’m definitely too busy to give this much work for the rest of the month, but would be up for a group of us getting together some time in september / october to work something out; i think josh is still on holiday now, but on past conversations he’s said he’s up for all the collaboration he can get – are you interested in the idea, jonny ?

    worst thing that could happen could be the 3+ of us having a couple of beers & actually seeing each others’ faces !

  7. Some interesting thoughts above about sharing info – I think there’s great potential for collaboration, with the ultimate aim of giving the music community in Birmingham, and the wider West Midlands region, the recognition it deserves.

    That’s the primary objective behind setting up a site like Cul-de-Sac, and what I want to do with the website is host a resource of quality journalism and photography covering the music-related activity based here – the focus being on news, reviews and interviews/profiles because other websites are already doing listings so well.

    One well-known musician I recently interviewed commented that “going out to live music is the new staying in” – hopefully the content across all of these sites will encourage people to get out to venues, and if we can then stimulate discussion online about these events then the city may find itself attracting more regular coverage from the national music press.

    As a side note – the Cul-de-Sac site won’t be updated during the next couple of weeks, but after that I would hope to upload content regularly and bring some writers and photographers on board. In the meantime, any feedback is very welcome!

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