Sounds & Fury

Featured Past Post #70 (Administrative Note)

Apropos the Met's new production of John Adams's Dr. Atomic, a new Featured Past Post ("A Brief Note On Adams's Dr. Atomic”) is now up on the right sidebar.

S&F Top 50 Notice Update (Administrative Note)

Since our 5 October notice concerning the pulling of our priorly published 3rd quarter 2008 S&F Top 50 rankings, we've been checking Google's Backward Links counts for a selection of some 30 classical music blogs, and they keep changing almost from day to day, some by small swings, some by large (for instance, the count for Sounds & Fury has come up variously as 2380, 2830, 1910, and at last check is showing 2820; and Night After Night, which for more than a week appeared to be in what is called the "Google Sandbox" with both its PageRank and Backward Links stripped, at last check has had its PageRank restored, and is showing 2690 for its Backward Links count).

We at first thought the reason for this was simply that Google's (roughly) monthly Backward Links update had not yet propagated completely throughout Google's thousands of servers and so had not stabilized. But this almost daily change in count suggests something else and something more fundamental is going on, and we can't suss out, nor can we find authoritative information on, just what that something else might be. Until (and unless) we are able to find such authoritative information to make a determination as to whether it positively or negatively impacts the use of Google's Backward Links count as the basis of our S&F Top 50 rankings, we are suspending publication of our quarterly Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs rankings indefinitely or until such time as we're able to find a useful replacement which, at this writing, seems nonexistent (Technorati's so-called "Authority" number is a bit of a joke, and thoroughly useless for this purpose).

To those who found the S&F Top 50 a useful resource, our apologies.

S&F Top 50 Notice (Administrative Note)

For reasons known only to Google, the propagation of its monthly (roughly) Backward Links updated index throughout Google's thousands of servers which typically takes something on the order of a few days to a week after it begins, still hasn't propagated completely and become stable for this past month (i.e., end of the 3rd quarter). Consequently, we've deleted our prior posting of the S&F Top 50 for the 3rd quarter of 2008 as just about every single number has changed, and the numbers are still changing. When this Google Backward Links update has finally propagated completely and stabilized, we'll then recompile our S&F Top 50 rankings for the 3rd Quarter of 2008, and re-post it. We apologize for any problems the now deleted prior posting may have caused.

Featured Past Post #69 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("Schepkin's Goldberg”) is now up on the right sidebar.

For The Benefit Of Those Who Track S&F Via Feed Readers

Another update (Update 2) has just been appended to this post.

For The Benefit Of Those Who Track S&F Via Feed Readers

An important update has just been appended to this post.

Featured Past Post #68 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("The Conversation Continues — By The Numbers”) is now up on the right sidebar.

For The Benefit Of Those Who Track S&F Via Feed Readers

An important update has just been appended to this post.

Featured Past Post #67 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("Never Thought I'd See The Day”) is now up on the right sidebar.

For The Benefit Of Those Who Track S&F Via RSS

An important update has just been appended to this post.

Featured Past Post #66 (Administrative Note)

To close out the annual Wagner Season, so to speak (the annual Bayreuther Festspiele ends on the 28th of this month with the sixth performance of its new production of Parsifal), another Wagner-related Featured Past Post ("TOFs And Wagner”) is now up on the right sidebar.

S&F Top 50 Progress Report — The "Google Dance" Has Begun

Good news. What search engine specialists still call the "Google Dance" has just commenced. That's to say, Google has begun it's periodic re-indexing of its entire database of Web pages wherein a recomputing of that all-important number called PageRank is made for each and every Web page in the index (for instance, this time around, S&F's PageRank has increased from 5 to 6 — a HUGE increase as PR5 is a high-population middle ground; a sort of demarcation zone separating the important from the unimportant), and then the Backward Links count for each and every page is recalculated using those newly computed PageRanks. The Dance typically takes some few days to complete, after which time we'll then finally be able to compile our Second Quarter 2008 S&F Top 50 rankings.

Stay tuned.

For The Benefit Of Those Who Read S&F Via RSS Exclusively

A major update has just been appended to this post.

Waiting For Google (Administrative Note)

We're at present blocked from preparing our Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs 2nd quarter 2008 ranking as Google has not updated their Backward Links data since the first week of May (reflecting April's numbers), and consequently the existing data are way stale. According to the best guess of the best publicly accessible sources (and it can be no more than a best guess as Google is so secretive no one outside Google really knows), Google supposedly updates that data every 30 days or so. But a fair random sample of our newly expanded list of classical music blogs (148 at last count) shows that the numbers haven't moved since the first week of May (again, reflecting April's numbers).

And so we wait.

Featured Past Post #65 (Administrative Note)

Today unofficially marks the start of the annual Wagner Season, so to speak (the annual Bayreuther Festspiele opens on the 25th of this month with a new production of Parsifal), and so an appropriate Wagner-related Featured Past Post ("Elegy”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Update: You all might also want to take a look at this post for an announcement of a Bayreuther Festspiele first.

Featured Past Post #64 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("An Audience For Classical Music”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Trashed Category Now Restored (Administrative Note)

Our TypePad-trashed category, Opera (mostly Wagner and Mozart), has now been restored by TypePad with all its posts intact, and can now again be accessed from the right-hand sidebar and from our Archives page.

Not Our Fault (Administrative Note)

Sounds & Fury was down for about four hours today (17 June) due to TypePad doing some more messing about with its application and servers, and not due to anything done (or not done) by us. We do hope that TypePad gets its act together PDQ, and becomes once more an application that can be trusted as in days of yore.

Our apologies to those readers who tried to get through today but found their way blocked.

Featured Past Post #63 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("On Conducting”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Worldwide Compendium

We've just been made aware of what turns out to be a valuable online classical music resource. It's a new website called Classical DJ, and the name is most apt. Classical DJ is a worldwide compendium of online commercial (broadcast) classical music radio stations neatly organized and hyperlinked for your convenience. We've added Classical DJ to our exclusive listing of Culture Sites on our left-hand sidebar.

(Note to those contemplating eMailing us to announce the existence of a new website or blog and requesting a link on Sounds & Fury in exchange for a link to S&F on the new website or blog.

Although we're most gratified when linked to by others, we don't engage in link trading on S&F. We almost dumped the eMail that came to us announcing the above website as it suggested such a link exchange. If you have a new website or blog that you think would be of interest or use to S&F's readers, by all means let us know about it. If we think the website or blog worthy of a listing on S&F, we'll list it. If not, not, regardless of whether you post a link to S&F on your website or blog or not. We trust we make ourselves clear.)