In 2005, while I was living in New York, I started a website called www.FreeSummerConcerts.com It was spawned by my own desire to keep track of all the free events all around the city. I figured if I found such a tool helpful, others would too.

So, I did my research, I compiled all the events around the city, input them into a database, and modified a shopping cart perl script to extract the events and send them to the list of subscribers to the site. The idea went over pretty well, the mailing list of subscribers grew, and I did it again the next year! Now in its third year, FreeSummerConcerts is really taking off! Demand has forced me to add New Jersey events to the database, and I've just announced a contest with a prize of a free paperback copy of Turn Your Passion Into Profit to the person who refers the most new subscribers to the site.

I didn't want to charge a fee for the service, so it's completely free, and the site generates income from the Google links on the site which people use to find other touristy and summer fun New York things to do.

So this year, thanks to the power and global reach of the Internet, I can be here compiling information from a beach in the North Pacific....
and still be able to help people some 7,778 miles (12517 km) away in New York have a nice time for their summer! (Images courtesy of www.gregjohnsonmusic.com and http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/)

Hmmmm... .I just had a thought. Since I got these two concert images from an artist website and a blog I stumbled upon while searching for Summerstage images, I should reach out the NY blogger community to help spread the word about www.FreeSummerConcerts.com. One more thing to add to my task list! If you're a blogger with a nice sized New York audience, why not post a link to FreeSummerConcerts, and I'll link to your blog from the FreeSummerconcerts home page. It's a PR3 site, but that should change in a few weeks!(Click on a 'Label' category above to read all the posts in that category)