AAJ would like to thank the Jazz Journalist Association for recognizing our ongoing efforts and we'd like to particularly thank the JJA management team of Howard Mandel, David Adler and Ken Dryden for presenting the best awards program to date. This year's ceremony was streamed from jjajazzawards.org and utilized social media to allow others to enjoy the festivities and participate remotely.
All About Jazz has made a 15 year commitment to expanding jazz's footprint on the web. Leveraging evolving technologies and led by a group of passionate and knowledgeable professionals, AAJ continues to present jazz on an expanding platform, while reaching new jazz enthusiasts daily. “Our focus has always been on the musician. We feel what's good for the musician is good for everyone else and that's where we spend the bulk of our development efforts," said Michael Ricci, AAJ's founder and architect. “It's about disseminating timely information like CD release schedules and calendar schedules, presenting musicians to a greater audience through interviews and profiles, and providing access to a vast database of musicians and educators--over 24,000 and growing by the day."
Recent All About Jazz accomplishments include:
- Photo Gallery: 2009's big project. It works a little like Flickr, but is fully integrated with the website. Professionals and fans can upload photos, associate them with musician profiles or associate them with events. We use tag and cloud technology and feature new photos weekly at the bottom of each page in our FEATURED PHOTOS box. We also feature a single photo as a photo of the day. Readers can place a daily jazz photo on their website or blog by grabbing our photo of the day widget code.
- We implemented a new menu bar, we replaced our Flash Featured Stories box with a jQuery animation, we converted the site to XHTML 1 transitional and we implemented more CSS. AAJ is a fully customized content/contact management website developed by a two-person programming team. With the exception of our bulletin board, everything you see at AAJ was developed in-house.
- AAJ partnered with Mosaic Records and launched a retail store at shop.allaboutjazz.com.
- AAJ Members can contact one another through private messages at the website.
- AAJ now offers 24 streaming channels through its partnership with JAZZRADIO.com.
- AAJ has published Spanish language articles and will expand its multi-language content offerings in the coming months.
AAJ is currently rolling out a new calendar. Readers can view their local jazz calendar on the bottom of every AAJ page; we re-designed the submission form from the ground up; we list upcoming festivals within the calendar box and on the festival directory page; and we're working on an industry-standard data feed for all live events. In the coming weeks, AAJ will aggregate calendar information from our input form, from external datafeeds and via email, with the goal of becoming the most comprehensive source for jazz calendar information online. We're also partnering with presenters and venues to ticket their events direct from AAJ.
AAJ will provide the technical foundation for the Jazz Forward Coalition monthly industry newsletter announcement. We'll have more news to share about the JFC in the next month.
There's much more coming before the end of the year and we'll keep you apprised of the latest developments from the AAJ News Center.
Until then, enjoy the site, and visit often!
