I just did some bitchin' about the Blog Posts in the "So now that we've been here for a while" discussion, I want to say: I love the Groups. It's like clubhouses within our Cave; almost like a county fair (stay with me, I promise it will make sense, or maybe not). Everyone can enjoy the county fair; some people want to check out the animals, some are there for the midway and the rides, some want to check out the flowers and vegetables and jams and jellies and preserves, and well, you get the picture. I think a group about the show "Lost" is great to have - I'm not a fan of the show, but my wife Tracy is a huge "Lost" fan. Her interest in comics is minimal but she loves to peruse the "Lost" group, just as she enjoyed "That Lost Thread" in the old site.
In the "So now that we've been here for a while" discussion, the Groups take a bit of a beating. People mention how some groups have spotty participation. I checked today, Feb 9, and only 16 of the 37 Groups have had any activity this month. 14 Groups haven't had any activity in 2010. How can we make the Groups better? I have some ideas - I started the Flash and Green Lantern Groups, so I'm going to increase my activity there, and send out more invites - it dawned on me that I haven't invited anyone since I started the Groups. Any other ideas?
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It's an interesting question. I was against the "groups" idea form the start, but then I went and started a group for the "Earth-44" timeline, because I realized it was a way to have the timeline on the board for the folks who were interested, without taking up a huge amount of space in the fora. So, I can't say they serve no purpose.
I was hoping for more activity when I started the Vertigo group. It gets one of my review postings once a month, which sometimes generates discussion, sometimes not. And of course I can no longer tell how many folks are viewing but not commenting. I could see an ongoing thread about The Unwritten, say, but I'm not reading it monthly myself, so I haven't started one. We've had a couple of other discussions that were active for a few days at a time. I still feel like group activity is largely invisible, except for the brief period new postings show up in the "Latest Activity" listing.
Answering my own question, I just added an RSS feed to the Vertigo: Graphic Content blog. Is there a way to add a second RSS feed? I'd like to open one to Standard Attrition (the Vertigo creators blog) as well.
We have two feeds in the Doctor Who group...but one is a widget. If one of the Vertigo feeds is available in a non-RSS form, you could have multiple news/blog feeds.
The TV/movies group RSS feed has three different sites as the source, but I had to game the system to do it — basically, I subscribed to the three sites in Google Reader, created a "TV News" folder for those three, set the folder to "public", and then used the RSS feed from that as the group's RSS feed.
So it's doable, but not easily, and not within the constraints of this site's software.
I think this is my problem--and the problem for a lot of the members of this community. I wasn't even aware that these reviews and discussions existed. I've started groups before myself, but quickly turned off email notifications because my inbox was getting filled up unnecessarily.
I think groups are a good idea in theory, but I wonder if in practice that they have more of a tendency to limit discussion rather than encourage it.
Mark Sullivan said:
I was hoping for more activity when I started the Vertigo group. It gets one of my review postings once a month, which sometimes generates discussion, sometimes not. And of course I can no longer tell how many folks are viewing but not commenting. I could see an ongoing thread about The Unwritten, say, but I'm not reading it monthly myself, so I haven't started one. We've had a couple of other discussions that were active for a few days at a time. I still feel like group activity is largely invisible, except for the brief period new postings show up in the "Latest Activity" listing.
The groups with the most recently updated activity are always at the top of the list, so I know if a group I'm interested in is up there, there's probably something new to check out; if it isn't, I'm good not worrying about it.
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So it's doable, but not easily, and not within the constraints of this site's software.
I think groups are a good idea in theory, but I wonder if in practice that they have more of a tendency to limit discussion rather than encourage it.
Mark Sullivan said:
Evidently, hard enough that many people don't do it.
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