This month brevity is my watchword. Why? Well frankly for no other reason than the issue is done, my editorial is due and Jeff Waful is about to show up at my front door so we can travel down to WMRQ to co-host this week's Jam Nation (more photos from the show coming later this month).

So what's exciting at the site? Well, given the vagaries of the calendar and all, we're offering up our year in review retrospectives. In particular I think Waful's "Jambands.com News: the Year in Review" is an interesting piece. I found it quite enlightening and invigorating to read back and consider all the events that took place this year (Jeff had to relive it as he read all 1300+ of our news stories to select the five per month that appear in the article- Btw, he probably wouldn't want me to admit this but the April Fool's stories had him flummoxed for a little while). In addition, I think the editor's live selections present a decent representative sampling of musical highlights as well. Next month we'll have our year end charts as well, with the top albums and radio spins of 2000.

Beyond that I'm happy that to announce that the search engine has finally returned. Actually it hasn't returned, we eviscerated the other one and this time we enlisted the good folks at Google to do all the heavy lifting. It's a pretty high-octane, sensitive engine that digs in for details. For instance as I sit here, I just learned that over the past twenty-nine months, I have hailed the glory of my daughter exactly four times. Of course by the time you see this it will be five. Go ahead, visit the search engine and enter "Caroline Budnick" (you'll also see that two of the other editors have mentioned her as well- I salute you, David and Ira). I'll tell you, though, the addition of this engine reinforces the exhaustive amount of content that we have published at this site over the past two and a half years. The action continues this month, I promise.

What else? Well this week we're selecting the winners for our Jambands Store contest. One of you will receive a free December order and others will garner Jammys shirts (a box came in last week), Jam bands books and the like.

Okay, that's it from here. Later this month many bands will start stepping up their touring again in earnest, so hopefully I'll see you out there (until then you can read about the action here, or listen in on Jam Nation, assuming Waful arrives...)