Greg Dona '10 also known as DJ Whack-a-Tone never thought that his music blog, Panda Toes, would become an international success.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Dona, who started the blog with fellow Dallas, Texas native Breck Gordon, said he began posting to his site on Blogger for fun.
As the blog started to get off the ground, however, public relations managers and promoters began to ask Dona and Gordon to feature the music of their clients, sending the pair songs to post and review.
As time went on, Dona and Gordon found that some artists they featured on Panda Toes seemed to rise from obscurity to relative popularity thanks to exposure on the blog.
Dona said that he was at first unaware of the fact that visitors were flocking to Panda Toes in droves.
When Dona attended the music and arts festival Bumbershoot in Seattle in summer 2007 with his own press pass, he was surprised to come across festival-goers who were familiar with the blog.
"I was just with the other photographers and we started talking about Panda Toes. That's when I realized how popular it was," Dona said.
Intrigued, Dona installed a hit counter to get a better sense of how many web surfers were visiting the site, and found that there were 200 to 300 individual hits a day.
In 2007, Gordon left the blog, and was replaced by contributing writer Dan Kagan '09, who performs as DJ HBBS.
Dona and Kagan continued to post and review songs on the site, largely focusing on electrohouse tracks, with some disco and top 40 mixes sprinkled in and the site's popularity continued see exponential growth.
"We hit our peak in my junior year," Dona said. "Panda Toes was getting 2,500 to 3,000 unique hits a day."
Near the middle of that year, however, the project ran into a roadblock.
"We had to stop posting mp3s because everyone was getting sued," Dona said. "We were getting everything from band managers and PR from the artists so our tracks were totally legal, but it just became too much trouble to fight to keep the tracks online when Blogger kept on taking everything down."
In the absence of mp3s, Dona said he was able to keep Panda Toes going by posting music videos to his site.
Readership trailed off. Now, Panda Toes maintains a stable readership of about 400 to 500 hits a day.
Although it has declined from its height, the popularity of the blog helped enabled Dona to get his start as a DJ.
During Winter term 2008, Dona studied abroad in Sydney, Australia where he said Panda Toes enjoys its second largest readership, after London, England.
While there, Dona met a Sydney club promoter who invited Dona to review his club on Panda Toes.
In the wake of that meeting, Dona himself became interested in becoming a DJ. An acquaintance offered to teach him the ins and outs of the art.
"I had touched turntables maybe four times in my life before I started learning. I had no idea how to read crowds or anything about DJ-ing in general. But I practiced a lot and it was something I really enjoyed," Dona said.
Dona made his first DJ appearances at clubs in Sydney, and has become a staple of campus fraternity dance parties and other events.
Last spring, he was the opening act when Three 6 Mafia performed at the College an opportunity Dona called the "highlight of [his] life."
This fall, Dona opened for the Gym Class Heroes and Wale concert hosted by Programming Board, as well as the Maino concert hosted by Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
Dona said he hope those appearances will be just the beginning.
After he graduates this spring, Dona said he plans to head to New York City with the aim of continuing both Panda Toes and his work as DJ Whack-a-Tone.
