Moving the forums off the front page

Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2008 3:14 pm

As you may have noticed, the forums have been moved off the front page. There hasn't been a helluva lot of action around here anyway. Secondly, some of those who do stop by to take advantage just want free advertising for their goods or services. We'll probably try the classifieds on the front page and see how that does.

Groupie Joined: Nov 15, 2007 Posts: 76

That's too bad.

It's clear that most musicians look to sites like this not to share and learn stuff, but instead to SELL stuff. (I'm all "on" promotion and all, but musicians promoting primarily to other musicians has never made very much sense to me...)

I'm clearly in the minority that the forum, being a vehicle for dialog rather than one-way broadcast, is the best part of a site like this. (That IS the ace that the internet is supposed to have over television and radio!...) De-emphasis of the forum is a step in the opposite direction I'd prefer, but, I understand it being about the dollar and all, and it's the way of the world...

Oh, well...

Groupie Joined: Nov 06, 2007 Posts: 81

Agreed. There was a time there for a few years that it seemed that everybody was posting on message boards. Drivel mostly though. Now they are all dead. The boards that is. Even the proponents don't come around any more.

Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 9:12 am

Quote:

I understand it being about the dollar and all, and it's the way of the world...

Oh, well..

Okay, now that we've alienated EVERYBODY...... Confused

Truth is this site hasn't made dollar one. The google ads are barely enough to pay for the bandwidth let alone adding any bells or whistles.

Originally we had hoped there would have been many more people who were truly interested in exchanging dialogue, building a cohesive and mutually supportive scene and sharing what they know and the experiences they've had in exchange for permanent links in the stories they submitted - but it just didn't fly. Generally, people are only interested in promoting their own act or product. There's no time for meaningful dialogue - save for the exceptional few - Gene, Wiki, Banned From Earth, Ken....a few others.

But there's still a good amount of traffic on MB so it's worthwhile real estate. We'll just have to keep on tweaking to see what still works.

Groupie Joined: Nov 15, 2007 Posts: 76

The era of the internet has unfolded a lot of interesting stories in its evolution. The chapter of how online forums fared throughout this present period ended in a way I could not have predicted; Namely, that every one that I've ever tried to participate in (with scopes of either the special interest of music or local geographical area) except for one, eventually failed. Generally, if I was an old codger in my 90's explaining to a grandchild how it all went down, I'd say something like this:

"At about the turn of the millennium, when I was in my 30's, online forums were popping up all over the place. Unlike before, with television, radio and printed word publication, there was now the ability to have true timely DIALOG in a conversation fashion as opposed to being broadcast to one-way (often this broadcasting being done by some large corporate entity). The idea of this new era where high-level information sharing was being put in the hands of individuals was exciting to me, since it really now allowed a synergistic group vehicle for ideas and learning to now occur, so my hopes for this were high; I really thought it would just take right off. Now that anyone could address such a wide audience, what was it that they were going to say? What things would be learned? The sky was the limit, and the prospect of it all was very exciting. The truth was, that either participants didn't really understand what it was they really had, or, they just didn't have anything substantive or important to say. These forums degraded down to chat-line style posts of one or two lines of saying "hi" and well-wishing, just 'net "graffitti", or general smart-assedness. That, or just capitalistic spam saying "Check out my product!" in one way or another. The forum and the idea of online communicative group synergy eventually died out by the 2010's, and just turned into another medium of commercialism and kids with lots of time on their hands boinging short messages to each other. As via-phone text messaging grew, that was eventually seen as a better vehicle for this latter kind of communication, so with that, the true online forum pretty much died by this time. It was an opportunity squandered, but people of that time that were so used to being electronic observers as opposed to participants, just were not ready for, nor knew how to use, a device this powerful yet. There were just too many "takers" and not enough "givers", and these forums ended up being dead, dried up trees with all the fruit picked off..."

And that's how I'm going to spin it...

Groupie Joined: Nov 06, 2007 Posts: 81

This forum is not busy but there are a few that I run across that are. You have to build it around the right core group and they must all have a common attraction. The more traffic that is generated the more traffic gets generated. The board will be self sustaining and feed off of itself.

I still go to the Iommi message board a lot and that place has hundreds of posts per day. It is very well maintained and the flow of information there is quit large. I've had dialog with people from around the world. That's probably the reason why it is as busy as it is. Per capita if you have a population of 5 billion people to draw off of that will all potentially be posters you will generate traffic. If you only have 10 million people to draw from there will of course be less traffic. In the down trodden time that we Michigoonians are going through, we really are just laughing stocks not just in the USA but around the world. Nobody really wants to have too much to do with us.

Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 5:31 pm

Michi-goonians Surprised

That's rich.

Groupie Joined: Nov 06, 2007 Posts: 81

I did not make that up. When I was in the service in Germany one of my roommates was from California and that was what he said "They" called us out there. He was somewhat full of it all the time so they all can't but the term stuck in my head.