To avoid two threads of comments running simultaneously and possibly at cross purposes, comments on this post are now being closed.

UPDATE My response is posted David Shaughnessy, A Counting Genius

Please tell me what i wrote that I need to apologize for and that is untrue?
Let me try to answer..

“OK Eolaí, you win.” Yes, this is TRUE. I am sick of trying to ask you to refer to the Kanss City Irish Festival properly and I realize that you never will.

“We won’t be bothered, especially since you don’t work for KCIF anymore.” This is also, TRUE. We, KCIF staff, won’t be bothered by your resistance to refer to the Kansas City Irish Fstival properly. Additionally, you don’t work for the Festival like you once did, which is TRUE.

“There is nothing in this arguement that will be settled.” See paragraph two.

So please tell me again, what am I apologizing for?

Due to its total inaccuracy and insult to my professionalism that implies, I will give you until the morning to post an unqualified apology for your last comment together with a complete retraction of it stating what you wrote was untrue.

In the absence of that apology and retraction I will show how spectacularly unfit you are to comment in public.

OK Eolaí, you win. I guess you will never associate the Kansas City Irish Festival with its true name. We won’t be bothered, especially since you don’t work for KCIF anymore. There is nothing in this arguement that will be settled. But please leave my family out.

Already there are many people unaware there is an Irish festival in Crown Center, and they associate the term “Irish festival” with the previous incarnations in Westport and Brookside - both of course in KC - or the previous location of Berkley Park.

Plus there are people who regard Governor Stumpy’s Celtic Block Party - which takes place very shortly in Waldo (again, in KC) - as an Irish festival, and why not since it’s very simlar to the early stages of the Westport and Brookside Irish festivals?

Excluding specific location information from references to events is very unhelpful to everybody in those circumstances.

Using only the phrase “Chicago Irish Festival”
and without specifying any other LOCATION
information, try and find out where both
TEADA and THE FUCHSIA BAND will be playing
later this year on September 16, 2007,
and then ALSO come up with the right
festival website.

Ready? Set?… GO!

You will be Googling your brains out for at
least an hour and doing a lot of cursing and
swearing… unless you also specify some
additional amount of LOCATION information.

Why?

Because there are TWO “Festivals” in/around
Chicago that are commonly referred to as
“The Chicago Irish Festival”.

One is not even actually in Chicago. It’s in
Oak Forest, Illinois, about 20 miles south of
downtown Chicago.

Location: Gaelic Park, Oak Forest, IL.

The other one is right smack downtown Chicago
within sight of Lake Michigan.

Location: Grant Park, Chicago, IL.

The FIRST one ( the one not actually in Chicago )
officially calls itself “The Chicago Irish Festival”.

The SECOND one is sponsored in conjunction with the
Chicago Mayor’s “Office of Special Events” and
does NOT “officially” refer to itself as
“The Chicago Irish Festival”… but everyone else
and their uncle does. Hence the confusion.

Example: TEADA and THE FUCHSIA BAND are actually
scheduled to appear at the SECOND one ( the one that
is actually in downtown Chicago at Grant Park ) on
September 16, 2007 - But TEADA’s own tour schedule
simpy says “Sep 16, 2007 - The Chicago Irish Festival”.

Ah… so what, you may say.

Kansas City only has one event that refers to itself
as “The Kansas City Irish Festival”.

Well… I submit that there may quickly come a time
what that isn’t true anymore.

Just for a totally hypothetical scenario… let’s
say that people come to perceive the Irish Festival
at Crown Center as being more the “loud and proud”
type of festival famous for huge throngs of humanity
and unless you want to stand up and be shoved around
for 2 hours you can’t ever get near the main acts.

Let’s say that some people begin to crave a “calmer”
kind of festival that is more focused on Irish
Traditional Music and the crowds ( and the wattage
of the speakers ) are much lower.

Let’s say that a “new” festival appears in the spring
at an alternate location. Perhaps even down at the
Berkley Riverfront Park where the original Festival was
held. ( Not a bad location at all as long as it
doesn’t rain cats and dogs like it did that one year ).

At that point there would be TWO “Irish Festivals”
in/near Kansas City and it won’t matter a hoot what
anyone actually “officially” chooses to call themselves.

The Chicago scenario WILL repeat and there will always
be some that will refer to one or the other as
“The Kansas City Irish Festival”.

As is the case with Chicago right now… distinguishing
between the two will all come down to LOCATION.

You will have to KNOW there is one at “Crown Center”
at one point in the year and the other one is down
at the “Riverfront Park” at another time during the year.

It could happen.

As was the case with Chicago… success tends to
breed success. The more successful KCIF becomes and
proves there is ample audience in the area the more
likely it is that ANOTHER (similar) festival will
appear at another location and time.

Personally… I would LOVE to see “another” Irish
(or sic:Celtic ) Festival appear in Kansas City
sometime in the spring. KC is now firmly on the
radar of most of the touring groups and they are
all usually out and about in the SPRING as well
as the FALL.

I think the current KC Fest has already proved
that the audience would be there for it.

Perhaps you could now educate the confused and angry, and point out that confusion and anger weren’t expressed when a similar variety of expressions to describe the festival were employed by me on the festival’s own website and blog for several years.

Even today on the festival’s website and blog the current writers of copy vary the terms they use to refer to the festival. Are they confusing and angering themselves?

There is only good in this, nothing bad - much as on this family website (you might recognise it) the phrase “Irish Fest in KC” is nothing to confuse or anger anybody.

Sometimes descriptions are better than names. Especially when people don’t know the names. I do refer to things as they are:

“Cathal Dunne in a bad green suit played the Irish festival in Crown Center last year in Kansas City”

Cathal Dunne did wear a green suit. It was bad. He did play the Irish festival that took place in Crown Center, specifically the one that took place last year. And Crown Center is in Kansas City.

The absurdity of anybody getting angry at that sentence is hilarious.

I think you’ll find the problem isn’t anything I do but that certain people want to be angry and then go looking for a reason to pin it on.

In Kansas City all the time I mix with people born in Ireland, and American people interested in Irish matters. Many of them are unaware that there is something called the Kansas City Irish Fest, and others are aware vaguely that the festival exists but unaware of where it takes place.

What I do in how I promote the festival to those people (there were 55,000 pages read on Irish KC in March and thousands of other readers via different methods) for FREE is something worth thousands of dollars to the festival.

I would have thought the correct response to this is gratitude, not anger.

Thanks for asking. I need to move on - making a living and all that.

You have to understand that for the non-professionals, the people that don’t earn a living at these types of things, have been confused, and angered, as to why you refer to the Kansas City Irish Festival as the “Irish fest at Crown Center,” “Crown Center Festival,” or “the September 2007 Irish festival.” Why can’t you refer to it as it is? Why do you make up names for it?

Oh, by the way, I am a professional photographer. My web site is http://www.shaughnessyphoto.com.

Thanks Eolaí!

Everybody, including you, uses search engines, but you’re not search engine professionals - I am.

I am not interested in the likelihood of what terms people search on - I make my living from this and that would be gambling for a living. I am interested in what people actually search on, and I do tons of research into it.

This post is not about the Kansas City Irish Festival, it is about Cathal Dunne and is therefore optimized for search engines, and other web traffic sources such as social media, for Cathal Dunne and the Eurovision.

It merely references the Kansas City Irish Fest out of local interest. It would be insane to use a post on Cathal Dunne to target web traffic seeking information on the KC Irish Fest - because hundreds of millions of people watch the Eurovision compared with only tens of thousands who attend the local Irish festival.

Restricting oneself to terms most searched on, if you were even right - and you’re not - merely limits your traffic.

I’m not actually directing anybody to my site - alas I don’t have that power - though I am making it easier for other sources to make my site available should people want to visit it. But why do you use the word “instead” - are you suggesting I should be working full time for free for the benefit of other businesses, specifically one with a budget of a quarter of a million dollars - which is about, oh, a quarter of a million dollars greater than my budget?

Or typing into Google “Kansas City,” “Kansas,” “Irish,” “Festival,” “Irish Festival,” “Kansas City Irish Festival,” or “Irish Festival Kansas City.” I think there is a greater liklihood that people would search for the Kansas City Irish Festival by using those words instead of “Irish festival in Crown Center.” Don’t you?

But then again, maybe you are directing people to you site, instead.

When I worked for the festival I compiled a list of these phrases, as used at that time, and gave it to the festival.

I don’t want to over-simplify things but try typing Cathal Dunne into Google along with any of the phrases “Eurovision”, “”Happy Man”, “Irish Festival”, or “Crown Center”, and see what happens.

So you are telling me, just to clarify, that when people are searching for the “Kansas City Irish Festival” they are infact searching “Irish fest at Crown Center.” Correct?

It’s my job to meet the expectations of the people who are searching, not their job to meet my expectations. This includes both the people who are are searching for the festival intentionally but choosing not to use any official name, and the people who are searching for it without even knowing it exists - believe it or not.

I think I’m starting to sound like Donald Rumsfeld.

It’s not a case merely of repeatedly trotting out phrases - that’s called keyword stuffing and has a detrimental effect on your traffic because the major search engines punish you for it. I’m a search engine professional - and I put a lot of research into this.

There’s nothing sinister about it. Unlike print media, web copy impacts, drives even, distribution of your content. Done right everybody gains: search engine users, search engines themselvess, my web site, and the subjects I post on.

Huh?…

Oh, I think I get it. You are telling me that when people search the “Kansas City Irish Festival” they really should be searching “Irish fest in Crown Center.”

I guess that makes sense, I think.

As both what?

If you’re referring to the term you used in your question and the term I used in this post, both terms are already used throughout the site among - as I said - many terms.

Check the post to which this one links, and the hundreds of other posts that reference the festival. And check the archives of the official festival blog and the hundreds of posts I wrote there where, as I said, I followed the same practice for the same reason - without questioning from anybody.