A few quick notes on the past year:

Most used search terms to find this blog from Jan. 1st to Dec. 30th, 2011:

• bill dawers    349
• corey smith chattanooga    244
• kenimer mound   192
• www.billdawers.com    188
• bill dawers blog    135
• savannah music festival 2012   111
• westboro baptist church savannah   95
• scad graduation concert  2011   81
• cold war kids scad   80
• savannah movie trailer   76
• cold war kids savannah   59
• williams sonoma savannah ga 54
• westboro baptist church savannah ga   49
• wayne cauthen    43
• scad cold war kids   41
• mayan site in georgia   40
• maya site in georgia  39

Why would someone search for www.billdawers.com rather than just type it into the address bar? The mysteries of the human mind and of internet use . . .

Regular readers are probably shocked to see “corey smith chattanooga” so high on the list, and I’ll bet the overwhelming majority of regular visitors have no idea what “kenimer mound” is.

Months ago, I posted a brief blurb on a Saturday morning about Corey Smith getting shut down at Track 29 in Chattanooga as he began his encore “Fuck the Po-Po”. The local press was slow to pick up on it, so people searching for information about the incident landed on my blog. In retrospect, I should have known that post would attract internet searchers in large numbers. People crave basic information and increasingly are going online to get it. Duh.

Kenimer Mound is the site in north Georgia that just last week was mentioned in spurious claims that the Maya migrated there after their civilization collapsed.

If Wayne Cauthen rings a bell, he was one of the four finalists for the city manager position in Savannah. He was easily qualified for the position and I’m still puzzled by how little attention the public gave him.

Search traffic has increased dramatically over the course of the year. As I write this early on the afternoon of Dec. 30th, exactly half of the site’s hits today have come from search engines.

Most viewed posts:

• Westboro Baptist Church picketers headed to churches, synagogues, schools in Savannah3,172
• Is there an 1100 year old Maya site in north Georgia? 2,521
• Venue censors, shuts down Corey Smith show in Chattanooga 1,419
• Cold War Kids booked for SCAD’s New Alumni Concert in Forsyth Park 927
• Thoughts on the denial of Ruel Joyner’s candidacy for Savannah City Council 713
• A recap of the 3rd Annual Junk 2 Funk Fashion Show at Savannah Arts Academy 655
• See a marketing trailer for the feature film “Savannah” 552
• “Lord I want to thank you for my smokin’ hot wife” 484

Most clicked link:

ARCHAEOLOGICAL TESTING AT THE KENIMER SITE, 9WH68   126

Most referrals from other sites:

• Facebook   20,747
• Twitter   1,017
• That’s Just Peachy   560

Total page views:

• 71,524

A few changes for 2012

I haven’t made any headway in finding other writers for the site, although that remains a possibility.

I’m going to start putting more videos up (mostly embeds from YouTube and Vimeo), and if I don’t have a lot of commentary, I’ll make those viewable directly from the homepage. I’ve got a couple there now. I’m not sure why I’m not already doing that.

I use Google Adsense ads, and have also been using the Google Affiliate Network. Those GAN ads are in the sidebar (mostly 125 x 125 banners). I get a percentage of sales generated by those GAN ads, but they have performed very  poorly. So I’m now selling ads for those spaces directly. Cindy Rents Savannah took over one of those slots a few weeks ago, and a handful of other local businesses will likely appear soon. I realize that these ads might create apparent or actual conflicts of interest; I’ll do my best to address concerns that come up. If you’re interested in those ad slots, go here.

I don’t plan to let this blog become overly obsessed with national politics, but I’ll inevitably be writing about the national elections in 2012.

A thank you

I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to those of you who have been reading my blog in its first year. It has been for me a much more interesting and productive outlet than simply posting to Facebook, and it has afforded me the chance to cover a wide range of topics that I cannot cover in my Savannah Morning News columns (which are linked in an automatically updated feed in the sidebar).

My best wishes for 2012.

Less than two weeks ago, I added a calendar for live music: 912 Music Calendar. That has its own page and is accessible through the menus like the one at the top. I posted the rationale behind it here, and there’s some additional info below the calendar itself. Essentially, I’m frustrated by how frequently really great touring acts have meager audiences when they play in Savannah. In part, that’s due to basic Savannah problems: widespread apathy, late or unpredictable start times, demographics, etc. But it’s also due in large measure to the simple fact that lovers of live music don’t get good, timely information about bands that might especially merit support (sometimes that information is available, btw, especially in Connect Savannah, but the info doesn’t get dispersed well). The main problem is inconsistent promotion by the various venues, but I think there’s also a need for key gigs to be posted earlier and in one place. I do a lot of things around town spontaneously, but I’d prefer to know about good shows several weeks in advance.

I also joined the Google Affiliate Network. Some of the GAN advertisers are now in the sidebar under the heading “Advertising Affiliates.” This is different than Google Adsense, which places the ads you see above, within, and below the content. Adsense generally works on a cost per click basis, and places ads based on users’ browsing history and on the content of posts. Other than being able to block certain controversial categories, I have very little control over the Google Adsense ads. There’s a limit of three large Google Adsense ads per page, by the way, although three “link units” can be added to that. The conversion rate on link units is very small, however, and I’ve pretty much decided to get rid of them. The ads in the Google Affiliate Network, on the other hand, involve specific advertisers approving websites on a case-by-case basis. I’ll get paid a commission (often around 5%) of sales that can be tracked back to my page. I’m allowed to promote the products and sites in the Affiliate Network, but I don’t really plan to do so (other than this mention). We’ll see if it works out. While my traffic has increased, I’m not sure I have enough to generate more than occasional clicks on specific advertisers in the Google Affiliate Network, and it takes many such clicks to generate sales.

Re website traffic: the blog spiked to almost 10,000 page views in May because of the heavy searching for info on Westboro Baptist Church and on Cold War Kids’ performance in Forsyth. This month is on pace for about 6,500 page views. Back in January, I had about 4,200 page views, fueled in large part because of the novelty I think. February through April saw just over 3,000 page views per month.

I continue to mess around with the layout. I’m back to using two sidebars — one on each side — on the homepage and other pages that list multiple posts. On individual post pages, one sidebar vanishes and the one on the left of the homepage moves to the right. Although wider ad sizes tend to perform better and I can’t run any wide ads in these narrower sidebars, this new layout seems more effective for the content.

Specifically, the added width of the main text area allows larger photos, videos, graphs, maps, etc. The additional sidebar on pages with multiple posts also gives me a place to put a blogroll with the most recent posts from those blogs that I routinely follow. There’s some tough reading in a couple of those economics blogs, but all are recommended.

To the primary sidebar I’ve also in recent weeks added some info about upcoming gigs as well as my Twitter stream. I’m still extremely ambivalent about Twitter’s utility, but some interesting things show up every now and then. If I had as many Twitter followers as I have friends on Facebook, I’d probably get almost as much blog traffic from Twitter as I currently get from Facebook. The Facebook referrals vary widely from day to day; in the last 7 days, I’ve gotten as few as 9 hits via Facebook and as many as 75. At this point, I’m averaging well over 30 hits per day from searches of all sorts of terms.

I still hope to add some other contributors at some point, as I mentioned in my last update like this, but that hasn’t come together yet.

I continue to make a lot more posts than I thought I would, but: I’m a fast writer, I have a lot to say (for better or for worse!), I continue to post here many things that I would have posted on Facebook and commented at length there about, I have a lot of interests that don’t make a good fit for my column, etc.

May was by far the busiest month for Savannah Unplugged (still not sold on that name, but there you have it), with an average of 340 page views per day as we enter the final week. But the median daily page views is closer to 190 I think. That’s because of spikes in hits related to two topics: Westboro Baptist Church (which I wrote about in a grand total of four posts in May — less than 10% of the month’s posts, although that was far too much for some readers) and the appearance of Cold War Kids at SCAD’s New Alumni Concert in Forsyth Park on June 3rd. Just yesterday, I found out that The Dirty Guv’nahs would be the opener for that show. Lesson: people are looking routinely for hyperlocal, up-to-date information about goings-on like those.

I keep playing around with some of the layout elements. I don’t make much ad revenue from those Google ads, but after I experimented with more columns on the home page back in April, that small amount of ad revenue plummeted. So I’m back to more or less the same basic layout that I started the blog with back in January. Humorously, since I have Adsense set up to run the ads, I got a card in the mail from Google with a voucher for $100 worth of Adwords, no strings attached and no further commitment. So, even though I don’t sell anything, I’ve got an “advertising campaign” going for the blog, which so far has resulted in over 20,000 impressions and 33 clicks. Here are the keywords that have resulted in two or more clicks: “savannah ga”, “savannah history”, “flannery oconnor”, “telfair”, and “census georgia”.

As of this morning, I’ve also added the feedburner capability to the list of links/recommended sites, so you can see the titles of the most recent posts on those blogs and other sites. Over five months, pretty much no one has clicked on those links in the sidebar, which is too bad. Calculated Risk and a couple of other economics sites are part of my internet routine — those interested in sober, serious economic discussions might want to check them out. I hope the additional info in the sidebar will help get people to dig more deeply into some issues. For Georgia politics and breaking news, I often check Jim Galloway’s Political Insider blog at the AJC and Peach Pundit, so they are both included there as well.

I have also added recently a WordPress plug-in (very easy to install, set up, and manage) that lists automatically generated related posts (some more related than others) at the end of each post. That’s a feature I appreciate sometimes on other blogs, and it’s one way to address my very high “bounce rate”, which on most days runs 75-80%. In other words, the vast majority of readers pop in and look at one post that they have found via Facebook or, increasingly, via an internet search — and then they leave without going to any other page on the blog. That’s fine if people are getting the information they’re looking for, but I just want to make sure I’ve got all the bases covered without things getting too cluttered. And let me be upfront about something else: while there is plenty of variation day to day, ad revenue is directly proportional to page views.

Re: search engines. Back in January, I got almost no traffic from search engines — obviously the newness and the smaller amount of content were major factors. Now about 30% of the traffic seems to come from search engines.

While there have been 98 sources and mediums of referral in May so far, three dominate: Facebook (36%), search engines (29%), and direct hits, probably in most cases by previous visitors (22%).

Anyway, if any regular readers have thoughts or ideas on what they’d like to see more of here, let me know. I’m still, by the way, hoping eventually to get some guest posts by others and maybe even a handful of regular contributors.

Over two weeks ago, I wrote about the news of the WBC’s appearance here, about some of the choices regarding community response here, and some of the actual planned responses here.

One of the most disappointing things regarding this issue over the last few weeks has been the snarkiness and rudeness with which some citizens who think it is best to ignore the WBC entirely have attacked those who plan various types of public protest or response.

As I’ve said before, I totally respect individual choices to ignore the hate marketed by the small fringe group, and I have even published here a logo created by Teddy Gongaware at the request of her brother Hartford Gongaware to say symbolically “Solidarity and Silence: The Only Welcome Hate Receives in Savannah.” Feel free to post it wherever you wish. I plan to put it as my Facebook profile pic for part of next week.

I think those who oppose an active response have a lot of good arguments on their side, but Americans do not typically ignore hate speech like this — nor should they typically ignore it. The WBC will be picketing schools, for example, which can hardly choose simply to ignore the hateful signs and chants. And I wonder if people would favor ignoring them if there were in fact a military funeral on their week’s schedule? There have also been some chuckles in recent weeks among gay rights proponents about the choices of religious institutions to picket, since at least a couple of them routinely espouse anti-gay views. Nothing wrong with a protest that speaks out against those longstanding biases at the same time that it counters the WBC.

There are solid arguments on both sides of the engage vs. ignore argument, and there’s no need to morally condemn those who disagree. For more background on this tricky issue, Patrick Rodgers has a great piece in the current Connect Savannah: “Ignore or engage”.

Some folks are going to turn out for sure, although I don’t know if Sunday’s planned counter-protests will attract anywhere near the 2,300-plus people who have rsvped yes on Facebook. You can find that event on Facebook here.

I also must note that the Savannah Morning News, for which I write freelance columns three days a week, has opted for “ignore.” There have been a couple of letters to the editor mentioning the WBC that I have seen, and a piece about the impacts on Sunday’s parking and driving downtown here. And that’s pretty much it. So the next time someone claims that the Savannah Morning News or “the media” generally is only interested in selling papers and generating web page views, point them to this SMN decision. It’s a decision I respect, but I don’t agree that the daily newspaper should ignore the serious questions raised by the WBC’s appearance regarding free speech, the limits of public protest, the strain that this additional work might have and maybe will create for local law enforcement, etc. The Savannah Morning News has decided to leave its voice out of the public discussion, and I think that’s too bad. But it’s a decision I respect.

I remain personally undecided about attending the protests, in part because I might have to spend some time Sunday putting the finishing touches on a long-planned talk at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home at 3 p.m. that day: “When Evil Comes to Town”. But I will probably attend some of the public protest activity for part of the time wearing my columnist hat, even if only the planned Peaceful Candle Light Response on Wednesday evening in Forsyth Park organized by Savannah Unite.

As some of you know, I’m president of the board of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home (term expiring this summer). The board members coordinating our spring lectures asked me to do a talk and I decided to talk about the drifters that wander into O’Connor’s stories. The title is “When Evil Comes to Town.” Many weeks ago, that talk was scheduled for Sunday, May 22nd at 3 p.m. at the O’Connor Childhood Home on Charlton Street, just across Lafayette Square from where, earlier that same day, picketers from Westboro Baptist Church will be at the Cathedral of St. John.

I mentioned that WBC was coming to town here, and I talked a little about whether the media and the public should respond here. In recent days, as the news has spread more and more widely, area residents have been organizing responses of considerable scope.

In this post, you’ll find some thoughts from me as well as a roundup of some of the protests of which I’m aware.

First off, I should say that the WBC’s odd picketing plans do not include any soldiers’ funerals. If they did, I think many of us would feel compelled to turn out specifically to support the families of the fallen.

One of the most thoughtful responses is being planned by Hartford Gongaware, who is promoting the idea of acknowledging the WBC’s presence essentially by ignoring them. His sister Teddy has designed the logo you see at right to signify three S’s: Savannah, Solidarity, Silence. He imagines a tagline like this: “Silence & Solidarity: The only hospitality hate receives in Savannah.” Feel free to spread the word about that — and to pass along the logo, or the alternate one with the hat that’s a nod to an older Savannah logo.

Using the logo somewhere like Facebook could be a great way for those who don’t wish to dignify the picketers with their presence to nevertheless make a statement. I love the idea.

I also love the idea of a “Phelps-a-Thon” fundraiser. The event encourages citizens to make direct contributions to the schools and institutions that are being picketed. Click to find the details for the Savannah Phelps-a-Thon on Facebook: Phelps-a-thon Savannah: AN ANTI-PHELPS EFFORT Please Help Spread the Word.

But there are significant physical counter-protests in the works.

I’ve been invited to the following via Facebook:
WestBoro Baptist Church Counter Protest. They’re coming to Savannah. The event has nine creators and so far over 1,500 yes rsvps, with over 500 maybes. I don’t know if these events will draw a higher % of those rsvps than most Facebook events, but that’s a sizable number in any case.
Westboro Church – COUNTER PROTEST has been primarily organized by Act Out Savannah and has over 200 yes rsvps.
Peaceful Candle Light Response against Westboro Baptist Church Visitation, planned for Forsyth Park on Wednesday, May 25th, does not actually involve direct confrontation with the picketers. It’s organized by Savannah Unite and also has over 200 yes rsvps as of this moment.

One important note about all of these protests: while WBC does not need permits for its gatherings of under 100 people, these events will need them, as I understand it. Also, it’s worth noting that there’s some bickering on Facebook about the largest of these counter-protests. Some see it as essentially a Christian exercise, while others do not.

There’s been considerable lauding of the actions in Brandon, Mississippi, when WBC tried to picket a funeral — there was an assault and cars were used to obstruct the movement of picketers. It all seems mighty fitting, somehow, but I cannot agree with violent actions or potentially illegal ones like these.

Others around the country have taken more absurdist approaches to the WBC, for example Super Heroes vs. the Westboro Baptist Church. I love the idea of countering hate with absurdity — or just countering absurdity with absurdity.

Other responses have involved essentially neutering the entire message of the group by pointing out their penchant for lawsuits. As stated on the excellent Savannah-based blog Yo Yenta:

Phelps and his crew of sick arenâ€t trying to save anyoneâ€s souls—theyâ€re trying to bait us into violating their right to free speech so they can file a lawsuit. The site God Hates Fred Phelps has a comprehensive timeline on WBC shenanigans if you feel spending your precious time on earth caring.

At the end of the day, individual citizens (including the parents, teachers, school administrators, and religious leaders who might find themselves in particularly tough spots) are going to have to decide how or if to respond. As I said in a previous post, I totally respect those who choose to ignore the WBC while they’re here. And I respect the choice of the Savannah Morning News, which so far has not covered any of this. But the WBC provokes such visceral anger and has figured so prominently in the most extreme tests of Americans’ freedom of speech that folks are going to respond in one way or another. Constructive dialogue about those responses could make us a stronger community, even when evil comes to town.

Part of that overwhelming response might be due to the relative slowness with which the information was reported by other local media; I’m beginning to think that our print publications have made a conscious choice to delay coverage.

I’ve had a lot of questions and issues thrown my way since that post about the role of the media and the responsibility of the community in the face of this news. Let me tackle two of those.

Why cover WBC at all? They obviously just want attention, so if we all just ignore them, we’ll lessen their power, right?

The most basic — and perhaps the weakest — argument to report the news is that consumers want to read it. Yes, there are times when I think legitimate news organizations and even blogs like mine should refrain from covering things that would no doubt arouse interest (I don’t really think there’s a compelling need, for example, for the U.S. to release a photo of Bin Laden’s corpse), but coverage of the WBC strikes me as defensible — even necessary — for a number of reasons:

• such coverage does not necessarily use others as means to an end
• it is not analogous to the salacious coverage of celebrities or the invasions of personal privacy that are so prevalent in the media generally
• many Americans respond with such visceral anger to the WBC slogans, pickets at soldiers’ funerals, etc., that the news is going to get out anytime they’re coming to town and citizens are going to react whether the media encourages them or not
• ignoring the WBC also means ignoring the inevitable community response(s)

Also, and I think this is a critical issue, the WBC’s picketing is one of the most challenging manifestations of our Constitutional right to free speech. A couple of months ago, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that their protests at soldiers’ funerals were protected speech. Justice Alito’s dissent raised all sorts of troubling issues about the regulation of nonviolent public protests. Such Constitutional issues are quite frankly news, as are the issues related to local ordinances, the use of sidewalks, etc.

Ok, so maybe the local media should report on it, but isn’t it best that citizens just ignore the picketers to the greatest extent possible?

I respect and applaud any citizens who choose to insulate themselves from the hate marketed by the WBC.

But there are many individuals and groups that will have good reason to want to respond in some way.

Military organizations have seen the pickets at soldiers’ funerals as a particularly hurtful affront to surviving family and to the armed services generally. Jewish groups, knowing the long and deep history of anti-Semitism, might see a moral obligation to speak out. Ditto for gay organizations that are especially concerned about the influence that the WBC might have on young people and others struggling with issues of sexual orientation. Christian organizations might also find reason to make some sort of statement. Since the picketers are also apparently targeting schools while they’re in town, some educators will undoubtedly craft some sort of response. Community activists who envision a more integrated and united citizenry might see a chance to bring diverse people together to make a stand for shared values.

I’m sure I’ve left someone out.

I guess the risk is that in responding at all we help the WBC spread its message, which might negatively influence a select few who would not otherwise have heard it. But there seem to me to be greater risks in not responding at all — and there seems to be much potential good that can come from organized responses.

There are a number of communities that have found novel ways to respond, and there are any number of actions already planned in Savannah for the week of May 22nd. I’ll be writing about some of those in an upcoming post.

Here is the schedule on the WBC website:

• Christ Church in Savannah, GA May 22, 2011 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM
• First Baptist Church in Savannah , GA May 22, 2011 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM
• Savannah Christian Church in Savannah, GA May 22, 2011 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM
• Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Savannah, GA May 22, 2011 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM
• St. John’s Episcopal Church in Savannah , GA May 22, 2011 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM
• Beach High School in Savannah, GA May 27, 2011 2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
• Jenkins High School in Savannah , GA May 27, 2011 2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
• Windsor Forest High School in Savannah, GA May 27, 2011 2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
• Jewish Community Center in Savannah, GA May 27, 2011 4:30 PM – 5:00 PM
• Congregation Mickve Israel in Savannah, GA May 27, 2011 5:30 PM – 6:00 PM
• Bnai Brith Jacob Synagogue in Savannah , GA May 27, 2011 6:15 PM – 6:45 PM

You can also go to this page to read these four instructive press releases:

• WBC WILL PICKET THESE FAG-INFESTED, PERVERT-RUN SAVANNAH, GA HIGH SCHOOLS ON FRIDAY, MAY 27
• FATEFUL FIG FIND: SAVANNAH, GA EDITION, FRIDAY, MAY 27: Jewish Community Center, Congregation Mickve Israel, Bnai Brith Jacob Synagogue
• WBC TO PICKET FIVE SAVANNAH, GA WHOREHOUSES, MASQUERADING AS CHURCHES ON SUNDAY, MAY 22: First Christ Church, First Baptist Church, Savannah Christian Church, Savannah Christian Church, St. John’s Episcopal Church
• WBC TO PICKET THE PEDOPHILE WHOREHOUSE CATHEDRAL OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST (222 E. HARRIS STREET, SAVANNAH, GA), SUNDAY, MAY 22, FROM 10:30 – 11:00 AM

I’m exhausted just thinking about how much coverage and conversation these picketers will generate. I can pretty much guarantee that I’m not going to write about them in my column (at least not in advance), and that I won’t dignify their presence by showing up at any of these short protests.

Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how Savannah reacts. For a variety of reasons dealing with both tolerance and security, the picketing will be especially problematic for the targeted public schools.

[UPDATE: I have gotten a lot of questions about the issue of media and community response to this; I have followed up here.]