It only seemed fitting that we tap a Phish site this month. So we’ve selected YEMblog, a site founded relatively recently by Scott Bernstein. Here’s what he has to say about its development…
If the word Phishing was never popularized as a way to describe a particular method of identity theft finding all the new content about the band Phish on the internet would be a piece of cake and could be automated. These days, queries of search engines for the word "Phish" bring back tons of stories about protecting your password instead of info about Mike, Jon, Page and Trey. When I saw my first Phish show in 1994 I didn’t know much about the quartet, but after my near-religious experience at the Beacon Theatre that night I wanted to learn as much about the band as I possibly could. I’ve been seeking out new information about Phish ever since which led to the creation of YEMblog in 2008.
I’m always scouring the web for the latest and greatest Phish-related videos, recordings, articles and blog entries about the band often sharing what I find with friends. It’s a time consuming process and eventually I figured if I was doing all this work finding the best new Phish content on the internet I might as well share what I found with the rest of the Phish geeks out there. Around August of 2008 I bought the youenjoymyblog.com domain and, using a basic website template, started collecting links on a daily basis as a test run. I told a few friends about this new site and soon after received an email from Todd Levy of Jamtopia telling me that he liked the concept and that he had a few ideas for bringing it to the next level.
Todd came up with an ingenious design and spent many dozens of hours creating a new easier-to-navigate site, YEMblog, which was launched on September 27. The timing couldn’t have been better as the announcement of Phish’s reunion came three days later. Each weekday I post links to Phish news, videos, audio torrents and more at YEMblog. I try to make sure that if I post a link it contains something worth the average Phish fan’s time. For instance, if someone uploads a poor-quality shaky 30 second clip of the Mike’s Song from Hampton to YouTube, I won’t post it on the site. There’s no algorithm involved, every decision of what to post on the site is handmade by an actual human who happens to be a passionate Phish fan. The best of the best posts have a light blue colored box next to them instead of gray box indicating they have been selected as "Editor’s Choice," making it easy for those with only a few minutes on their hands to get right to the good stuff.
With the band about to return to the road, the amount of material posted about Phish on the internet has expanded exponentially. Our goal at YEMblog is to make it easy for Phish fans to find the latest and greatest content easily without having to sort through a bunch of articles about Phishing. You can access YEMblog at the actual site, through our RSS feed, via e-mail or through Twitter.