This month were featuring Spbphreaks.com, home of the Santa Barbara Music Phreaks. Heres what site creator Philip Tseng has to say
The Santa Barbara Music Phreaks is a collection of over five hundred people. People like you and me who are passionate about having fun and going to shows. Back in 2001, SoHO became the predominate breeding ground for us to network and meet, and shows were and are still announced on our Yahoo! Groups list. People checked the digest or message roll for the latest ‘Phreak’ happenings around town.
However, the Yahoo! list was only limited to text messages. There was an increasing demand from Phreaks who’d like to have a separate space for messages greater than an announcement, such as in-depth articles incorporating photos, videos, and audio. In April of 2005, work was started on Santa Barbara Phreaks dot com.
It took us about a month to plan the site before we officially launched it. I didn’t want to start something that was incomplete. If you’ve seen any of the decorations that the Musicphreaks do at shows, you’ll know its a complete experience. I wanted the website to mimic that.
Since its launch in May of 2005, the site has featured in-depth show reviews, articles, and an extensive collection of photos of various artists and festivals. There’s even a series of videos called phreak.tv:
I remember the first episode of phreak.tv. We dressed up in suits, I had a fake media pass, and we went to interview people coming out of the Allman Brothers show. Silly, but it was a hoot!
The site looks to develop its poetry section and stream shows through a feature called phreak.radio.
The biggest challenge facing the site is to make it more available to all users. ‘People look at the site and the first impression that they get is that I spend a lot of time coding all the new articles. They’re surprised to find that articles require no coding and that we have an open publishing policy on the site. If you want to publish something, contact me and you’ll discover how easy it is.’ Sbphreaks.com runs on a multiple-iauthor platform called WordPress.
For more information, contact Philip Tseng at [email protected].