While some of us were destroying brain cells celebrating the 2008 years since the death of Jeebus at the vile hands of the Heevrews, Kenric Ashe of dBMonkey.com was working his delectable ass off to provide you people with an easy way to update your band/venue's calendar. BarFly was one of the first websites to integrate dBMonkey calendar data with our own listing database, making it a win/win for everyone involved. As it is, our calendar is updated with info supplied by dBMonkey every 20 minutes or so. Which means when you update your website's calendar on dBmonkey.com, it is reflected on ours.

Now you can do this with MySpace as well, and since so many of you would-be slowjammers are whoring for my friendship on a daily basis, I assume this would be of some interest to you.

I've taken liberties with a few paragraphs from the email he sent me, and also, please ignore the fact that I refered to Kenric's ass as delectable.

So what the hell is this MySpace Integration anyways? Well basically it's a Flash widget you can insert into to your MySpace page, and the data is powered by dBMonkey. That means now you only have to enter your event data once for ALL of your distribution points: your website, email newsletters, MySpace/FaceBook/other social networking pages, press releases, and any 3rd party organization that's also powered by dBMonkey.

When you are ready to plug the widget into your MySpace page just go to www.dBMonkey.com and log in, then click on the new MySpace Integration link. Not to worry if you don't have technical skills because they aren't required. All you need to know is how to edit your MySpace profile (consult with MySpace support if you need help with that). Also if you don't have a dBMonkey account yet just get back to me and we'll get it set up.

Now that this project is done, the last major goal for dBMonkey in Portland is to get all (or at least most) of the news & media sources on board. Some of them have tentative plans to create their own databases and data entry systems. To all you promoters and club owners out there, here's where I can use your help. Whenever you have the chance please remind them that you use dBMonkey and let them know you prefer to use it as your single point of data entry, otherwise you'll have to enter your data again for each news/media source that isn't powered by dBMonkey. They will benefit as well from not having to reinvent the wheel.

Next time you have to email the Willy and the Merc your calendar info, tell them they should be using dBMonkey because they can save bundles of man hours on their end while saving you time as well.