A Welcome Site

Tuesday April 14th, 2009 - Lake Villa, IL

It’s been way too long but www.dobiemaxwell.com is up and running. Finally! I know I could have done it a lot sooner and I’m probably the only one who cares it’s even up at all but that’s ok. I needed a website and thanks to my friend Shelley Hernandez I have one.

By her admission and mine it’s not going to turn any heads or drop any jaws…yet. It’s a simple but functional site which is still a work in progress but at least it exists and we can start to tweak and improve and experiment immediately. Shelley did a nice job of making the best of the information I gave her and I’m grateful for her help. I’ve really needed this.

I’m glad the club I’m working in Appleton, WI in May requires their headliners to have a functioning website or I probably wouldn’t have addressed this for a long time if at all. I probably would have kept making excuses or ignoring it and it would have gone undone.

Part of it is the pain associated with the ugly situation with my ex business partner. He’s the one who handled my site before and I never questioned it. I was told it was a good site but I really didn’t check it that much if at all. I was too busy working and creating and I’m still like that now but you can better believe I’ll be a lot more hands on with this project.

I wanted to have a nice website before because I thought it was the wave of the future at the time. Now it’s a given. When I first had one I was ahead of the game. Most comedian friends of mine didn’t have one and most didn’t have a desire to have one. Now it’s a fact of life and most working comedians on all levels have some kind of an internet presence.

Myspace was all the rage for a while and Dane Cook allegedly built his career by using it to network with millions of people but it appears to be dead now or at least cooling off. Facebook was the flavor of the week after that and it was pretty hot but now it’s Twitter.

I don’t even know what the hell that is but I hear everyone talking about it. Supposedly it involves mass texts several times a day. I’m not excited about it but that seems to be the latest flavor of the week. I can’t keep current. By the time I get to that it will be old news.

I have a hard enough time answering my emails without worrying about Twittering or a person I don’t know ‘writing on my wall’ on Facebook. It’s getting out of hand faster than I can even learn the terminology but I better embrace it or I’ll be in the dinosaur pile soon.

This is all over my head and I admit it but I have two choices - ignore it or embrace it. If I ignore it I’ll be out of the game sooner than later and people with less talent than me that didn’t pay nearly the dues that I did will get my payoff. I’d really hate to see that happen.

Instead I need to embrace new technology in all it’s forms and use it to my advantage. I am willing to learn and also to defer to those who know more than me (which is any child four years of age or older) and that will at least keep me in the game. Getting a website up was a crucial step but by far not the last one. Now I need to get some people to look at it