Linking to KC Irish Fest
NOTE: This post is here for historical reasons but as of July 7, 2007 is no longer applicable.
Looking for Kansas City Irish Fest on Labor Day Weekend?
Shannon, in a comment on the recent Black 47 post asks:
In most of your blog entries, you create a link to whoever you are talking about EXCEPT the Kansas City Irish Festival. Just wondering why you you claim to promote all things Irish in KC and don’t include a link to the Festival, KC’s largest Irish event. You even go as far as saying the Irish festival in Kansas City
Thanks for your query, Shannon, and for reading. My linking policy is standard blog behaviour:
1. In each entry I do actually link to the subject I am directly talking about, like the BBC in Beautiful Day Mr Beckett. I treat the Kansas City Irish Fest the same way. For example see the posts announcing the inaugural KCIF Pub Quiz, and John Spillane’s participation in the 2006 festival.
2. I do not link to subjects that are indirectly referred to. You may have noticed many entries that similarly referred to the Parade without linking to its official site - see Bar Natasha for example. The KC Wizards, The Boomtown Rats, The Young Dubliners are other very recent examples of not being linked to because they are not the direct subject, just like KCIF.
3. There will be odd occasions when indirect references are linked to, but only when such references are rare enough to not have specific blog posts directly about them.
4. The one time I did not link to KCIF when it was the direct subject was the recent post announcing the beginning of the launch of the new 2006 KCIF website (Update: For housekeeping reasons this post has been amended many times since its initial posting and no longer bears any resemblance to the original entry), which as the post explained wasn’t ready for visitors. So I didn’t link then. This is similar to me not linking when speaking directly about KC Hopps Pubs at 360 KC, and the VooDoo Lounge when Gaelic Storm played there.
Oh, and sometimes I forget. Bob Reeder and Eddie Delahunt have been the biggest victims of this, not KCIF, but I’m hoping with their links elsewhere on the website they’ll forgive me.
5. Regarding my use of the words the Irish festival in Kansas City, I’m not sure what you mean. In the post you comment on I say An Irish festival in Kansas City because I am referring to Brookside, Westport and KCIF.
That said, with Irish Festival season all over the USA about to commence, there will be many mentions of dozens of festivals, and in an attempt to minimize repetition I am likely to vary usage of all such festival phrases, especially if a festival itself refers to itself by many variations. You yourself referred to it as KCIF, the Kansas City Irish Festival, and the Festival.
6. While I would like to cover all things Irish in the region, I don’t profess to promote them. Many I will, and many will be promoted simply by being referred to. I expect the KCIF will continue to be promoted directly and indirectly.
It’s also a rather large scene with much more than KCIF, but suffers from lack of information and publicity despite the great participation and success of the parade and KCIF. To date I have yet to get around to even mentioning the excellent Nine Mile Burn for example.
Sometimes I also cancel some entries that I have drafted so as to not compete too closely with the festival’s own blog. Nor have I covered that whole slew of traditional Irish music from Scartaglan through to many great musicians playing in the area today. Plans to address are already underway but it’s a huge job.
7. Until very recently I worked for KCIF and its previous incarnations in Brookside and Westport I did the website for seven festivals in total, as a paid position and before that as a volunteer like yourself. Indeed I held several volunteer positions in the early days of BIF. I am a huge a fan of the KCIF weekend and the organization that puts it together. I number most of its Board and Committees as my friends.
However IrishKC.com cannot exist solely to promote KCIF, which due to the excellent work in providing information KCIF does, would be very easy to do. Although I stopped working for it I didn’t stop loving it, but I do not want IrishKC to be a sycophantic website of worship. If you read every entry of mine with the assumption that I am biased in favour of KCIF just as I was when I authored the KCIF blog then you shouldn’t have any misconceptions about me doing anything to hurt the festival. KCIF is big enough to look after itself, and does not need the promotion that many smaller organizations could use to help the Irish community thrive in KC.
8. Design changes are planned for Irish KC, and when they are in place I should have a mechanism where even indirect references can ultimately lead visitors to the relevant website in all cases, without turning IrishKC into a Parade or KCIF linkfest, regardless of which is the biggest Irish event in the city.
9. I am just one person trying to make a living, and I will make mistakes - like yesterday when I didn’t post about Bob Reeder’s and Eddie Delahunt’s weekly slots - simply because my brain thought Wednesday was Thursday!
10. I think the subject of this blog entry has primarily been the Kansas City Irish Festival and linking to it, so you should check out www.kcirishfest.org (update 2007: this website is now defunct).
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
What does eolai gan fheile mean?
Let’s pretend you don’t know, and your mother can’t tell you.
You might remember Eolaí from last year. Coming from the Gaelic word eolas(knowledge) it means ‘guide’. The gaelic word gan means ‘without’. And the gaelic word Fhéile has more than one meaning. It means feast, as in La Fhéile Padraig - what we call St Patrick’s Day, or more correctly the Feast Day of St Patrick. And it means festival.
As IrishKC started a week before St Patrick’s Day, at a time when I for the first time was not attached to any Festival it seemed, and still does, very appropriate.
Back in the days of the Brookside Irish Fest I touted the use of the word Féile as the name for the Festival itself, for branding purposes, but nobody else on the committee agreed. They understandbly felt it would alienate the non-gaelic-speaking midwest, whereas I felt the midwest was already used to gaelic words such as Feis and Fleadh.
Not to speak for Shannon, but I wonder if she meant the list of links under “Kansas City” where you have the Feis, The parade, Missouri Valley Folk Life and KC Irish.org, but not KCIF?
Nope, Shannon asks specifically about blog entries:
In most of your blog entries, you create a link to whoever you are talking about EXCEPT the Kansas City Irish Festival
My sidebar links, as I have told anybody I have requested reciprocal links from, are subject to a major redesign, so I won’t be adding in every KC Irish website before that redesign.