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.

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Mike Nielsen]

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:

[Mike Nielsen]

My reply bounced to the other two committies since I'm not on their email lists.  :) Can somebody forward that to them?

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, Mike Nielsen <rasta...@yahoo.com> wrote:

[Lionel English]

done

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[Mark]

Hi,

my.comics.org .. heh that is near perfect no?

I think I have made my stand on this clear before but just to repeat.
People love creating collections, look at any of the social sites and
you will see collections, favourites and groups form.

There is a benefit to the main GCD project however; should someone
spot a missing comic from the main index they are likely to add it to
"complete" their collection. Even more so it could be noted that a
comic is in skeleton and another user could encourage someone to index
it but discovering who owns it. Another benefit is the possibility of
bringing together additional social networks to GCD social side of
things. That way increasing the user base and hopefully the indexer
base.

But they there is the question of finances; how much will it cost to
host an additional site and what sort of resources will it need.
Equally how stretched will the technical team become if they are asked
to support and build an additional site.

I can see the positives and negatives with this; for me it falls
toward the positive side of things.

Thanks
Mark

[Henry Andrews]

Financially speaking, my.comics.org will probably more than pay for itself.  We're not even out of space on the current servers so at least at first we wouldn't even need to increase capacity.

The tech question is more troublesome, but hopefully we can get it started and this sort of work will bring in additional volunteers.  Nearly everyone who works on their own project of this sort does collections management.  I find that puzzling, but it seems to get people very excited.

thanks,

-henry

---

From: Mark <znx...@gmail.com>
To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wed, August 18, 2010 4:51:04 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] my.comics.org

[Lou Mazzella]

I'm also concerned with the resources needed to accomplish this, but do think it would be beneficial to us in the long term by increasing use of the database. Not really sure that it strays from our mission statement either as it keeps with our goal of disseminating information about comics. -Lou --- On Wed, 8/18/10, Mark <znx...@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Mark <znx...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] my.comics.org To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com

[Lionel English]

For the purposes of the current discussion, you guys don't even have to worry about resources.  That will be the job of the finance and software committees :-).

But if you're curious, from a hardware perspective it would cost nothing--it could easily be hosted on our existing two servers (we wouldn't need a new machine, as you can map multiple domain names to the same machine--www, dev, docs, and beta.comics.org are all the same machine, as an example, with the other machine being a dedicated database server that interacts with the web servers on the first machine).

So, no extra hardware/hosting costs means there's no financial impact--other than increased revenue if the project drives traffic to the site.  So the only real resource cost is programmer time.

That could be an issue, but all they really need to do is get a fairly simple site up and running and wait for the interest/traffic to draw in another programmer who wanted to work on that aspect of the site.  So what it will come down to is we can set it up as a goal if we want to, and the tech team will be allowed to veto it if they think they don't have the manpower resources.  But Jochen has expressed active interest in the project, so tech resources might not be an issue either.

--
Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net

[carch...@aol.com]

As long as we have the capabilities to do it and as long as it doesn't harm our non-profit status, I have no problem with the idea. I am in general for anything that helps increase participation in the website.

 

Comicbase might not be happy with us though, as we have helped each other over the years. We would become a direct competator to them.

 

my best

-Ray

[Tony Rose]

I don't think we'd be in *direct* competition.  What my.comics.org would be a web thing and comicbase is a desktop ap, isn't it?





tony

----- Original Message -----
From: carch...@aol.com
To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 1:24:12 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] my.comics.org

[Henry Andrews]

They also do pricing, which I can't imagine us ever doing.  I also can't see any other reason someone would buy their software, as other sites like comicbookdb.com have offered collection management tools for years.

thanks,

-henry

---

From: Tony Rose <tonyr...@comcast.net>
To: gcd-membersh...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, August 19, 2010 12:11:28 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-membership] my.comics.org