I have such a long list of albums being released soon to tell you about, you wouldn’t even believe. My calendar is already booked with several posts each day all the way through mid-November! I am trying to spread out the news and not shove it down your throat all at once, but I still want to give you all this info as soon as I can. So, I decided to make an album release calendar for the site. This way, you can look ahead to see what’s coming out before I actually give you the details in a blog post. How does that sound? You can expect a calendar for the next few months to be online within a few days.

Facebook is becoming one of the most popular social networking sites, so I decided to create a German music group there for you to join and find other German music fans. Head on over to Facebook.com, log on (or register if you don’t already have an account), and join the group.

Germaniac.com has a new contributing writer, my good friend Joey. I’ve known him since we started college together 5 years ago. He has been subjected to my speakers blasting all kinds of German music while we were roommates, and he seems to have gotten hooked because now he wants to find some new bands to listen to. His column Let’s Start a Fire will give you somewhat of a newcomer’s perspective as he discovers various German bands and expresses his thoughts about them. I think you will really like his style, too, because unlike me, he’s actually a writer and I know he will definitely come up with some creative posts.

I gave Joey a few band names as a starting point, but I have no idea what he’s going to be writing about first. All I know is that his first post will come sometime in the next few days. I hope you find his contributions to be useful and entertaining.

Summer is coming to an end soon, but there’s no reason to feel down. The next few weeks are going to make August a really great month for German music. Lots of incredible releases are coming out in all different genres, and I have a full schedule of posts through the end of the month. I’m sure you will find something new that pleases your ears.

I also just added a new feature of the site, the Germaniac.com group on Flickr. Flickr.com is a photo sharing site that has features like groups and photo pools to enhance the online community experience, and I think this is a great opportunity for German music fans to share their images. Please feel free to add photos of yourself, your music collection, concerts you have been to, or anything else about German music. It’s easy, just upload your photos, join the group, and then just go to the photo’s page and click the “Send to Group” button.

I have already added the first photo, the new Germaniac.com logo. What do you think?

I have always liked talking with people about German music and helping them discover new bands they really enjoy. Over the years, countless people have asked me all kinds of questions about this topic, and I have seen many more being asked on forums and websites, too. So to help everyone out, I decided to launch a new segment of the blog called Ask The Germaniac.

If you have any questions at all about German music, just send me an email at germaniacdotcom@gmail.com and ask. I will write an article on the blog about your question’s topic. It’s quite possible that I already know the answer, but if I don’t then I will do my best to find out for you. Either way, your question will get answered and other fans will learn from it as well.

This Ask The Germaniac page will always be available in the Pages menu to the right, for quick reference. You can also bookmark the page at http://www.germaniac.com/blog/?page_id=88 if you wish.

Germaniac is now part of the MySpace phenomenon. This social networking website seems to be working pretty well for spreading music and news, as well as uniting fans of similar bands, so I figured it would be useful to help spread the word about Germaniac.com as well. If you like any kind of German music (and I hope you do since you’re reading this blog) and you have a MySpace account, please visit MySpace.com/GERMANIACdotcom and add us as a friend. Thanks.

GERMANIACdotcom got some promotion Thursday night on the Radio Goethe broadcast. Listeners to the show heard Arndt saying a few nice words about this site towards the end of the program. He was also very kind and added a link to the blog on the main menu of RadioGoethe.org. If you stop by the Radio Goethe site, take a moment to leave a message for Arndt in his guestbook.

Thanks very much for your support, Arndt! And thanks to everyone who reads the blog. I really appreciate everybody’s support!

You may have noticed that the category list on the right side of the screen is looking a little more organized these days. I’m trying to make it easier for everyone to find things since the list of categories is getting pretty long. All of the band names are now subcategories under “Bands”. Similarly, the new “Genres” category features a list of genres so you can find other music you might be interested in more easily. And the latest new addition is the “About” page which tells you all about the Germaniac blog.

I hope these changes will make your experience using the blog a little bit better. If you have any comments or suggestions about what else could be done to make the site better, please let me know. You can either leave a comment here or email me at greg@stahlhammer.org. Thanks.

Our webhosting service recently suffered a major power failure which caused our database server (which holds the blog posts) and it’s mirror backup to become corrupt. This caused all of the posts to be lost. Fortunately, we were able to upload our own personal backup to restore all posts as of June 7th, but any posts since then have been lost permanently. We will try to repost some of these entries within the next few days, but the text and content may not be exact copies of what they were originally.

We apologize to our readers who have been wondering what has been going on during the past 2 days. Germaniac.com is back!