The conference has slowed down again recently. Is the burden of 18 months of items too great, or do people like having it as a convenient archive? Is a conference restart in order?73 responses total.
I'm honestly haveing no problems iwith it, but I'm also skipping alot of the items...but I don't think that would change with a new conferance. :)
(no problem with the number of items. many of them deal with music that I either have no interest in, or deal with music of which I have little knowledge [I tend to lurk in these items]. as Ken has lamented before, I haven't really been able to discuss my specialty [hip-hop]. most of the groups that I can discuss are pop acts from the past 10 years; if it charted in the top 10, I should know something about the group.) (I guess part of my problem with discussing music is, while I'd love to go into the details of why LL Cool J featured Canibus on a remix, but dissed Canibus not only on the record, but also left him out of the video, which prompted Canibus to release a song entitled "Second Round KO" which basically tears LL a new anal cavity, I'd much rather listen to the music, and _feel_ the music.) (hmm... in the process of writing this response [and struggling with it], an idea popped in my head: would anyone be interested in a listening party?)
It's been discussed before...
...and I'd be up for one.
I might be interested.. whether anyone else would be interested in what I might be interested in, though, is an interesting question..
(that's the dilemma I have. few people seem interested in the history of Eazy-E and NWA, or what Debbie Gibson has been up to, but, hey, if you're willing to listen to the music first, and let me explain later...!) (...but a listening party doesn't directly affect what Ken sees as a lack of activity in the music conference. [it might indirectly, if it encourages people to try out new music, and then those people begin to discuss the music.] I don't really have an answer for that problem, or even really good suggestions; the music conference is certainly more popular than any conference I've fairwitnessed for the past four years, and the people who do take care of the conference do so well; the music conference was the first conference that I discovered after Agora; it even had the first response I'd ever entered in PicoSpan, once upon a time!) <carson thinks he's used too many semicolons in one sentence, and hides from the grammar police>
"Unit 23, we have a run-on sentence in progress in the Music Conference.
Proceed immediately to the scene and use any means necessary to subdue
the violator.."
I don't think conference size is the root cause of dwindling participation
though it certainly can't hurt to prune a little of the dead wood.
I don't really believe in conference pruning myself. What harm is the 'dead wood' doing?
The grex ideal, as I understand it, is that we would just roll the existing conference out and retire it as "music2" for eternity.
I can't recall, does Picospan have a special file that it shows you the very first time you join a conference (as opposed to the normal conference startup msg)? If so, wouldn't it be helpful to put a little note about the "read since" command for first-time visitors? I know when I was first bouncing around many years ago I was quite put off by many conferences where it seemed like there was a huge body of stuff from ages back -- small, active conferences were much more attractive.
("set bulletin")
This conference has continued to have a LOT of potential-- I was one who worked hard to get the ball rolling and have people think of myriads of topics concerning music. (I'd like to hear more on music ed, music in the schools, etc., etc. but most aren't educators.) While the conference seems cumbersome, I think it's well organized, categorically. People can always come back with new information. Perhaps I am inclined to see this partly as an archive.
I 'retired' the chain letter scam in item 148. You can still 'r 148' if you want to see the item or its few responses. If we get more of these I expect I will just kill them.
Thanks.
Yay!
I'm not looking forward to the gory details in the next chain letter I get. "A public access conferincing fairwitness broke the chain and the next day his CD player began scratching his irreplacable import- only folk music CDs.."
<rotfl>
augh.. did I actually write "conferincing"? my brain's almost totally shut down after the past couple of weeks, which doesn't bode well for back-to-school. wherever did I get the idea that summer was supposed to be a time of mental recuperation?
My mind recupperated. In California. And it didn't even bother to take me along. It sent me three postcards.
I'll kick this item. In party, mziemba was arguing that it was time for housekeeping, that the conference was too confusing to newcomers, and there were too many duplicate items -- numerous soundtrack items, for example. Take it away, Mark...
Good idea. I had mentioned in the past that some folks were duplicating an item or two, but it was too late, I suppose.. At least it's being done now.
There is really no way to prevent duplicate items. You can't force people to do a 'browse' before starting a new item, and you can't force people to use clearly descriptive item titles.
I also suspect that a lot of new users don't know they can do a browse much less a find (and many might not even care in the eagerness to start a new item).
If others feel they're appropriate I'll put up with them but I'm a little tired of the item links from the auction conference. Rather than a profusion of limited-time items linked into the music conference (which will then stick around and clutter the conference until doomsday or a restart, whichever comes first..) couldn't we just have an item where people could enter references to appropriate items in the auction conf? That way those of us who aren't interested could forget it and have it stay forgotten..
Who's gonna morn, if the itmes are de-linked up their freezing in the auction.cf?
Well, there won't be any more auction links from this round of the auction. I'll put my foot down. :) No, seriously, aruba has declared that the auction is closed for new items. The music-linked items have been among the more active in the auction, so I figure this is doing our conference's part for Grex financial support. Civic virtue and all that.
I honestly don't mind them being here....since it brings attention to them, when I know that I wouldn't have wanted to go through the auction conf. And it was just 2 or 3 items...:)
Another kick for this item. In November this incarnation of the music conference will have been around for three years. I'm starting to think about parking this pile of items as "music2" and starting a new music conference for the new century. Given the general chaos I expect around the year rollover, I'd probably want to start the new conference around mid-December. We've talked about a conference restart twice before in this item and I've been talked out of it both times. But I think I may push a little harder this time...
Is there any reason _for_ a restart, besides 'it's been a while'?
(in theory, it's easier to read through without fewer items. I believe said theory developed from the days when more people were reading & responding to items, with less frequency. granted, it's easier to browse through 20 items than 200 items, but it's also less likely that the browser will find the item desired.) (I'm all for a restart, BTW.)
Hmm....I kind of like having old items around: you never know when someone will nudge one and make it active again, and they don't do any harm just sitting there. Also, in conferences that don't have a lot of constant activity, restarts can make for less conversation and not more -- fewer items to respond to. But, whatever...I don't have any real strong feelings on this one.
What, again, is the purported value of a restart? This is now an archive of music information (and trivia). If you worry about newcomers, isn't everything except a couple of items marked read for newcomers?
I think it depends on how you look at it. A restart might encourage some new users to come in and create new items. I think we can all agree that we've just begun to scratch the surface of the deep diversity of music-- Ken once told me that there are Usenet groups that are much bigger and possibly more thorough. re:31 I agree that the structure we've created here is good-- we eventually return to all the old items here. I don't necessarily think that we would have too much trouble regenerating discussion in a restart. I think it would be possible to create a music2 cf that is significantly different from this one where we could encourage newcomers to come and participate. I also think it's possible that if newcomers were to address topics that have been previously addressed here, that we could quickly and efficiently cross-reference them, especially for those that have access to Backtalk. re:32 I don't mind that this cf has become an archive, but I am disappointed that it has become more so an archive of music trivia than music information. Perhaps I am biased as a student of music education, but I think this cf has more potential than to merely be a repository of musicology for the general public. I noticed that my item for music education and pedagogy has been dead for quite some time. I'm not saying that we should discuss music theory, technique, and history in scholarly detail (unless someone's interested, heh heh), but I think they could be touched on a little more than they are. I came to A2 a few months ago with my wife and although music careers are not really a strength of the area, I was nonetheless impressed with the incredible amount of resources that was here. We were on the North Campus with Ken, Sindi, and Jim and I was just amazed with the displays in the music building-- seeing items I'd only read about before. In short, I'm hoping that this cf will be a think tank for performing artists and composers as well as those who listen to them. <babble=off>
The primary serious interest on Grex is computers. There are many conferences with topics in which there are people with serious interests, but not many people with serious interests in many of the topics are found here. Its apparently the nature of the beast.
It would seem so since Grex is still on a relatively small scale. I would like to think that trend is changing somewhat since more people are using computer-based technology than ever before. Music performance and music education have been EXTREMELY affected. I talked with my voice teacher some time ago about new software that plots out voice patterns. It seems to be effective in producing a visual comparison between the voice pattern of a pitch sung ideally, and that of your own. The technology is not new, of course-- it's been used in speech therapy-- but apparently, it's being used in vocal training for singing, now. I forgot where Dr. Nesselroad said the developer was from; we don't have it here yet and he was discussing it with him elsewhere. I think the developer lives closer to the East Coast than the West Coast over here. I'm not sure how many of the music students here on this conference have used the TAP system for learning rhythm, but the system developed in Bellevue, WA (a suburb of Seattle) was taken from analog machines and converted to a software program called MusicWare by a company in Redmond, I believe, which would put it in the neighborhood where Microsoft resides. It's true that music people in the computer industry are rare; today, it seems to be taking in M.B.A.'s and even some communications students (the industry is looking for social skills that perhaps some coders may be lacking). Computer applications in music are very broad, but unfortunately, it's taking forever for the schools to catch up. Since music education is often seen as a frill, it's usually one of the last areas to get widespread attention. Now that I've said that, am I the only prospective music teacher here?
Cliff Flynt, Bill Roper, Steve Simmons, Steve McDonald, Dan Glassier
are all computer programers/workers that do music. However, one would
more likely finding them at Sceience Fiction conventions than at your
local coffe house.
I still can't read the coding, particularly those 'Go To'
statements one finds in written music fast enough to process it in
real time.
Well, yeah, and most of early synth music *was* based on programming, especially with the introduction of MIDI.
Depends on your defn. of "early" synth music. If you go to Walter (now Wendy) Carlos and "Switched on Bach", that was all analog and performed in real time (well, multitracked, but not sequenced). Programming didn't arrive until the mid to late 70's, and was still limited to running only a few monophonic synths. The 80's, when personal computers coincided with the introduction of MIDI, is when software became common. But I guess you could say drum machines were programming, and those appeared in the 70's and perhaps even earlier. The early units weren't really programmable, though. The presets on a Hammond drawbar organ were about as close to programming as you could get, early on. But then the Hammond was also the first additive sine wave synth, way back in the 30's.
Yes, I was thinking of that, and I should have made the distinction a bit clearer. The Information Society made a distinction between songs programmed in software and those programmed by hardware alone. Wasn't the group noted for their work in synth programming by software?
((Leslie and I have phone problems at home. They began Monday. They are intermittent problems; the phone started working this afternoon for a couple of hours, long enough for the Ameritech tech to visit and declare that there *was* no problem. Phone stopped working again just hours after that visit. ((Anyway, I'll be scarce in the conference this weekend, unless we have another period of dial tone. ((If I was really ambitious, I'd take advantage of this party-free period and write some reviews to be uploaded later...))
We forgot to wish the Music Conference a Happy Tenth Anniversary!! Mike McNally entered the first item in the original music conference on July 23, 1991. That conference, save for the items we foolishly deleted back when we worried about conference disk space, is available as the "oldmusic" conference, and someday it will be available as "music1." That conference ran until late 1996, when we started the second and current incarnation.
If you wish to start a third incarnation, you have my full support. This edition now has over 300 items.
Yeah, I was kinda thinking something like that too. It takes longer than anything else on my cflist to come up.
If you read this entire item, you might see why I have interpreted conference user sentiment as being opposed to a restart when the subject has come up before. However, there is a certain neatness in the idea of having each version of the music conference represent a half-decade, more or less.
True, true. And if you've done it twice, it's traditional, so you don't have to argue about it the third time around :)
I'd be in favor of a restart..
Some questions: I'm pretty adamant about having item #1 be (1) essentially the contents of resp:1,7 (item 1, response 7) and (2) frozen, so that newbies get something helpful and meaningful when they first join. Suggestions for improving that first item are welcome. Kewy and raven: you haven't been very active. Do you want to continue as fairwitnesses in music3? What else would people like to see in a conference restart? I'd like to get back to scott's idea of putting an index to hot items in the login screen. But people bitched at the layout I used last time. Scott, I'm punting this to you. A login screen change doesn't have to coincide with a restart, of course.
Oh, and I promised Mickey he could have an easy-to-remember number for his Miscellaneous Thoughts item. Any other special requests?
I think the other issue with the hot-item list was what items should be listed. I guess I'm not that excited about the idea anymore.
<nods> It sounded like a good idea, but it seemed hard to put into practice. Two thoughts: You could have a login screen listing the current incarnation of some of the `traditional' items: Now Playing, John's Ragtime Journal, maybe the endless Napster item. On the one hand, these items are pretty often active, so they're a good thing to have pointers to. On the other hand, I don't know how interesting they'd be to someone who doesn't follow the conference regularly anyway. You could also have a login screen explaining the Picospan `browse' and `find' commands. "To find currently active discussions about Celtic music, type `find "Celtic" since -5'", or something of that sort. I'm not sure if that's assuming too much Picospan knowledge of new joiners or not -- after all, once you find the items, you need to be able to call those items up, get to the response you want, and so on. Was the idea behind the Current Item List to help new members, or as a crutch for the memory of regulars?
Newbies would just need one line to point them to the Picospan Cheat Sheet in Item 1.
if you think 300 items is bad, you shoulda seen how slow the original poetry cf was... over 999 items... I would go make a cup of tea and a sandwich while I waited for it to load...
Somebody at lunch said today: Gee, after the Cooking conference was
restarted, it was never the same... :/
Here are the items I want to link into the next music conference.
I can be talked into adding many items into this list :) though
there are some I'd just as soon leave here, to take a fresh start
on the topic:
item
----
9 231 Ragtime Notebook
(One of the oldest active items on Grex. History demands
its continuation.)
293 35 Music Retailing
(We just rolled this item a little while ago)
300 6 Mickey's Miscellaneous Musical Musings
313 31 History of Music in two semesters
315 73 The Sixth Napster Item
(The Napster items roll with Agoras)
317 14 British Folk
In addition, there would probably be pretty directly, new items on the
following topics:
Personal introductions
NP: Music to Conference By
CD recorders
(or should we continue the existing item?)
Folk & Roots: Continental Europe & The Mediterranean
(Mickey and I have a lot to pour out here)
World Music: Africa and other warm places
Opera (linked to Classical; I might just take the existing opera item)
Shows At the Ark
<krj gets very scared at the idea of tampering with the music conference.>
I think we ought to link or at least cut&paste the current CD burner item, since it is full of still relevant info.
ok.
don't forget the "heavy rotation" item. If not a link, then a new one.
We can create new versions of any of the items you want, but stuff which is mostly/entirely lists is the sort of thing I would prefer not to link. Remember that today's conference will be available as "music2" for as long as Grex lasts.
Hmmm, did talk of a restart convince everyone to save their thoughts for the new music conference? Is there a rough consensus to go ahead with this?
I'd say go for it. :)
Sure, do it.
D'accord.
I have sent mail to cfadm requesting a start to the restart process.
What I would like to see is when we start to get clutter in music3, items get linked to music2 and removed from music3. Things like the On Stage 1997 item is wonderfull stuff for us grex verbage pack rats, but a huge obilisc to new users, who may be used to the newsgroups where all postings go away in around two weeks or less.
If we were going to do that I'd want to set up maybe music3 and music4, with music3 as the storage conference. I like having the conference be an archive of a five-year block of time. Walter has set up the new conference; I'll try to load the first item and link in the items mentioned above this weekend sometime. (Other fws, please hold back on this for now.) Any more items people want to link out of this conference to music3?
Well, the new one, 320. Please. :-)
I'll plan to link all new items beginnng today into the new conference. (Unless they are really, really, really stupid ones designed to piss off the fairwitnesses...) If you have some comments to add to an old item, and it isn't on the list of items to be linked to music3 -- "Musical Obituaries," for example, or "Heavy Rotation" -- consider starting a new incarnation of this item with the "enter" command.
------(planned item 1 text, comments welcome)-------
(remember this is the first thing a conference newbie will see)
Welcome, newcomers and veterans, to the Grex music conference!!
We talk about all sorts of music here, as well as the technologies
and business of music. Feel free to start a discussion on a topic
you are interested in, and see who joins in.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please send e-mail to
your active hosts, krj@cyberspace.org or scott@cyberspace.org
NEWCOMERS: If you came to Grex via telnet or direct
dial, here are my suggestions for getting up to speed with
our antique Picospan conferencing system. (You might want to print
this text out, or make a few quick notes to have a cheat sheet.)
* at the 'OK:' prompt, type read since 2/1
to read discussions in the conference since February 1.
Replace that 2/1 date with a date between two weeks and two months
ago, depending on how much you want to read.
* Next, at the 'OK:' prompt, type browse
to see all the subject lines. Note down the item numbers of any
subject lines which look promising. To read item 3,
the Ragtime Music item, type read 3
* At the bottom of each item, the prompt will read 'Respond or pass?'
There is a third choice: forget
Use 'forget' whenever you find an item too boring to bother with.
((If you came to Grex through the Web interface, none of these
commands apply to you. Backtalk, the Web interface, is pretty
intuitive for most users.))
* To get back to see item 1 & these instructions again,
from the 'OK:' prompt, type: r 1
Thanks for visiting Grex's Music conference!
Grex also has a Classical Music conference: j classical
and there are two old versions of the
Music conference kept as archives:
1981-1986 j music1
1986-2001 j music2
(responses will be frozen)
Ooops, make that 1991-1996 and 1996-2001, sigh.
I'm hoping to get to this in the next day or so, though my life is complicated right now by Leslie's return from Europe. I'm a little worried that after I link in the continuing items, Music3 is going to look like The Folk Music Conference.
don't worry, the young'n's will take care of that. *Wink*
I would like to support the music3.cf/music4.cf to keep the conference clean and cleanable.
I have set up music3 and asked conference administrator Walter (i) to swap it in. At some point very soon this conference will become "oldmusic" and it will also be known as "music2;" the original music conference will be "music1."
As of a little bit ago, the conference restart has happened. Please let me know if there are any more discussions to link over from this conference; go nuts creating new versions of your favorite list items. Good bye to music2, which I think was pretty successful.
You have several choices: