my.comics.org

[Lionel English]

I'm passing this along as food for thought.

 

This idea has been brought up several times in different contexts both from within and without the GCD.  It came up a couple of times during Henry's dog and pony show at the San Diego con.  And I'm pretty sure it came up during earlier discussions on both the membership and software committees (which is why I'm cross posting the idea--and my reasons for including the financial committe will soon become obvious).

 

The idea is extending the GCD to allow tracking of people's comic collections--i.e., haves and wants.  This is a feature that seems to be very popular and very much in demand.  My initial reaction to the idea was always "that's not really what we're about".  And to a certain extent I still feel this way--that's not what the GCD proper is about.

 

However, after thinking about if for a bit after the San Diego Con, Henry, Jochen, Ralf and I (and I hope I'm not forgetting someone else's contribution) starting discussing the idea again.  I think it was Henry who came up with the idea for "my.comics.org", which is such a great name I had trouble resisting.  But the idea would be for a sister site, within the comics.org family, that piggybacked off of www.comics.org, but was also separate.  So the main database would still operate as before, with no evidence of my.comics.org, but we'd also have the sister site that would use the data in www.comics.org as its backend, and would have the collection management tools layered on top.

 

The primary advantages of this idea, from our perspective are two fold, and related:  more users, and more traffic.

 

If the feature were popular, it could drive more traffic to the comics.org sites, meaning more ad revenue.  And more traffic also means more potential users, which in turn also means a potential increase in indexers and possibly also programmers.

 

So, while I continue to believe that this idea does not directly support our mission statement, I also now believe that it has the potential to indirectly feed back to the main project.

 

Talk amongst yourselves.

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Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Lionel English]

Forwarded at Mike's request, but really you guys can just talk on your own lists if you like.  If each committee wants to adopt it as a goal, then that just makes it more likely that the board will adopt it as one of the winning goals.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mike Nielsen <rasta...@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 4:24 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] my.comics.org
To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com, gcd-finan...@googlegroups.com, gcd-softwar...@googlegroups.com

Well, as you know, this is the ONE thing that XOW does that we don't.  And I played with it a bit on their site.  And honestly, I couldn't see myself spending 100's of hours putting in what books I have.  For what reason that my local list doesn't give me?  So I can see it on the web?  So if I'm at some show/shop and I don't have my list but do have my laptop I can check if I already have something?  (Which I can do anyway cause I keep my list on a wiki) I know everybody says they want it but I have yet to see one thing that I would fine usefull for doing it.  And I'm open to reasons why it would be usefull.  I'd be a lot more likely to use something on the GCD than on some site that has no track record of longevity and could be gone in six months. But if you are going to do it, I think you should somehow allow each user to share their collection "info" with other users.  For instance, I know that Lou collects certain titles, and if I can quickly see what he's missing I might know if I have some of them.  But it would have to be an opt-in by both parties kind of system, similar to "friends" on facebook.  I wouldn't want just anybody to see that data. Mike Nielsen     Atom: "They are replicating." Aquaman: "Yes, and they are making more of themselves too!"  - Batman Brave and the Bold Cartoon episode "Journey to the center of the Bat"  --- On Wed, 8/18/10, Lionel English <lio...@beanmar.net> wrote:

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Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net