Folk Alliance now publishes the FolkDJ-L radio charts.

The Folk Alliance has been talking with the FolkDJ-L editors and Richard Gillmann and they have reached an agreement to publish the FolkDJ-L charts that Richard compiles. The Folk Alliance will publish the top twenty-five selections of each list on their website Folk.org and will also publish compiled charts in the Folk Alliance Newsletters. The four charts are TOP ALBUMS of the Month, TOP SONGS of the Month, TOP ARTISTS of the Month, and TOP LABELS of the Month.

FolkDJ-L is the folk-music-on-the-radio listserv that serves as a virtual gathering point for all manner of FolkDJs as well as others interested in keeping up with folk-on-the-radio including artists, publicists, record labels, managers, agents, even fans. Playlists are posted, information is exchanged and issues pertaining to folk music and radio are debated. FolkDJ-L was founded by Tina Hay in 1993. Mike Yuhas took over as listmom in 1997. A couple of years ago he passed it on to the current committee consisting of Arthur Berman, Bob Blackman, Mike Regenstreif and Paul Stamler. Membership is free and open to anyone who's interested. For more info please visit folkradio.org.

The process of compiling the charts/lists is automated. Richard does hand correct some obvious errors and typos. The results are based on playlists posted to FOLKDJ-L during the calendar month. Richard wrote a pair of programs that work with the Eudora email program's filtering feature. One program parses each playlist as it comes in and adds it to a spreadsheet. The second program processes the spreadsheet into a readable report. Playlists have to include artist, song and album name (label is optional) and be in a reasonably regular format for Richard’s program to be able to parse them.

The Folk Alliance is excited to work with these DJ's who have put in many hours of volunteer time to make FolkDJ-L such a worthwhile effort in support of Folk music.

Korea

Interesting photo of the Korean peninsula at night, taken by the US Defense Department. South Korea show many lights burning, while the North is almost entirely dark.