It has been a while since I blogged, and my daughter's adventure continues to head towards the sky. As you know I wrote about their Jonas Brothers fan site which has now grown to a point where it is poised to pass the band's official website in traffic.

Beyond that, my daughters have now gained celebrity status. Going to a Jonas Brothers concert has fellow fans approaching them about every 5 minutes wanting to take pictures with them. My girls have also started a very popular V-Log where they interview young muscians and artists (of course starting it out with the Jonas Brothers), recently when we were in NYC going to interview a young up and comer, we stopped at the Disney Store and a girl approached my daughters and actually knew who they were and started talking to them as a fan would! Over 7 hours away from home and they're r ... Read More »

As you know my daughter runs the largest Jonas Brothers fan site on the web. I help her out with the technology aspects of it, and in the process I have been gaining a lot of insight into the tween & teen entertainment industry.

As part of this experience I watch how the fans are supporting the Jonas Brothers, who if you didn't know are a fast growing musical talent signed by various Disney holdings like Hollywood Records, and the Disney Channel. In addition, they get a huge amount of play by Radio Disney. The band is also trying to break into the mainstream and getting a lot of play on Top 40 radio like Z100 in NYC, and recently KIIS FM in LA. One of the hardest places they have been trying to break into is the TRL countdown on MTV.

Getting on TRL appears to be a big issue here. There definitly is no lack of fans voting for the Jonas Brothers. The fan base is huge, so why no major headway ... Read More »

Our little family project is getting some more exposure. This time from the Erie Times Monday edition. They have a great article on my daughter, her site JonasBrothersFan.com and our new endeavor FanGap.com.

The stats are even more impressive now, her site now has almost 16,000 registered users and gets about 16,000 visitors per day. The FanGap.com site has also doubled in traffic since the article was written.

Peter Panepento, a former Erieite now in D.C., started a great new site for folks who love Erie, but now distant. GlobalErie.com, and Peter's blog Outside Erie. It's a great place to stop and visit.

Peter blogged about my daughter's website which has just experienced some explosive growth over the past few months (16,000 unique visitors per day!) and now we've gone and started a new idea based on her fan site.

Read Peter's blog, it's a good read.

So I've blogged about my daughter's fansite called JonasBrothersFan.com and the phenomenal success it's been. She now has over 8,000 registered users, and gets over 7,000 people visiting the site per day. It is growing like crazy.

My other daughter wanted to start a fansite about a young and upcoming actor/singer named Chris Koon, so we started ChrisKoonFan.com.

So with all these fansite ideas, my daughters and I came up with the idea of just creating an umbrella site to consolidate these sites and then aggregate content from the various fansites (or what we now refer to fangaps, and people who are members are known as fangappers). So FanGap.com was born out of a couple fansites.

Let's see how this idea does, and by the way it is all powered by DotNetNuke, o ... Read More »

Sometimes in the online world when approaching a project people seem to classify the issues facing a website as a technology issue. It's as if building a web site is this mysterious thing wrapped in so much technology it's just too much handle. Just sitting in the office of a technology provider gets nerve wracking; hearing all the techno geeks spitting out acronym after acronym and having no idea what any of it means - html, Ajax, XML, HTTP, Java, ASP, .NET, Web services, Web 2.0, what all does it mean?!

I'm here to tell you not to worry about all those acronyms, phrases, and geeks telling you what to do, do what you know. Websites are nothing but a different way of doing your business; bricks and mortar are the traditional way, but they both have something in common and that's people. In this article I'm going to discuss community sites since they're a growing influence on the web and generating plenty of interest.

Community; what do you think of when you hear community? Think ... Read More »

I blogged in the past about my daughter's Jonas Brothers fansite and the traffic it receives. It gets over 7,000 people per day, and has over 5,500 registered users since the end of March of this year. My daughters went to a Jonas Brothers concert in Cleveland yesterday and the band brought out breakfast to the girls for being the first ones to show up. They then posted the video on YouTube, and the... Read More »

DotNetNuke developers now have an event of their own, DotNetNuke OpenForce '07 is to be held in Las Vegas in November. I'll be presenting on "Building a Community Site with DotNetNuke". I'll be covering all the great tools that DNN provides for the site administrator to build a community site and generate some user activity. Be sure to attend and meet all your fellow DNN'ers.

Another career change for me. I left Sogeti recently and moved on to Blue Chip Consulting Group. I was at Sogeti for a pretty short amount of time as the Microsoft Practice Manager, but in my new role I will be a Solution Architect. The new role enables me to focus on technology and use my web skills to build some great solutions.

I'm pretty excited about Blue Chip, they are growing fast and doing some great things.

We purchased a Nintendo Wii for my kids for Christmas. A little while ago, my three year old walked out of the living room, and suddenly the Wii no longer would work. Basically it wouldn't take any game disks. So I did a little searching the web and found out about Nintendo's excellent customer service and our warrenty. So we called Nintendo to tell them about the Wii no longer working. The person on the phone said no problem a new Wii will be sent out in a matter of days, just return the old Wii using the package provided. No cost at all.

Now this is how customer service should be.