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Re: Narrowing the field (Re: Currently available looper music webpage)



Greg & Bernhard,

Not trying to create a competition or anything! :)  I had already done this
last night, and written most of this email, but was zonked so I decided to
send it out today.  Obviously, I'm going ahead with that plan, but I really
don't want to create a confusing situation.  Maybe everyone can have a look
and make comments, and we can decide where to go from there?

Everyone,

I threw together a quick demo of the idea I had re: LD artist listings.  It
also seems to lend itself to individual audio file links, and to CD 
reviews,
so I also integrated that idea into the demo.

The link:  http://www.mrscox.com/sslinks/links.php  The root of this is my
wife's website (she's an 8th grade english teacher).  Please don't email 
her
questions about diagramming a sentence or anything. :)

The basic idea:
Treat artist listings (and individual track links, and CD reviews) similar
to old-school Yahoo listings.  There is a primary set of characteristics
that define the *browsable* heirarchy, but each listing also has specific
fields for other characteristics, so that advanced *searching* can be done.
This supports the idea that a few folks have mentioned, and that Andre
proposed a list for - being able to build specific queries across these
characteristics to find the artists, audio files, or cd reviews.

In the demo, the pre-defined categories are "media" related - i.e., Artist
Sites, Audio Files, CD Reviews, etc.  Artist Sites *could* be sub-divided
into sections for browsability.  Something concrete would be good - like
"home region of the world".

Each listing/link then has a description and a set of characteristics.  For
demo purposes, I just kinda translated Andre's list: Desc, Genre/Style,
Instruments, Looper, Reference Artist, Live vs. Studio approach,
Compositional Approach, Year Released.  These characteristics could be an
endlessly debateable topic, so I'd suggest we not linger on it too long, 
and
instead provide an interface like this:

- for each characteristic, have the user choose a certain number of
predefined values (3 Genre/Styles, for instance), and then also include a
small freeform text area for them to add their own words.  So, I could
choose "Ambient", "Solo Guitar", "Electronica" and then type "rhythmic, out
of tune, boring" in the freeform area.  Those would all be concatenated
together when someone does a search on "Genre/Style".

Again, debating which list of Genre/Styles (or Live vs. Studio 
descriptions,
or - heaven forbid! - Compositional Approaches) to use doesn't sound like
fun.  Maybe someone could just put a reasonable proposal on the table for
each, and we go with that?

You'll see that I mocked up the search page to handle all of these
characteristics, but the gears aren't installed behind it to make it really
work. :)  Just giving a feel for how that interface might look.

Would love to hear comments!

Added today: Greg - if this looks like a way you'd like to go as well, let
me know, and we could split up the work in getting it done.  I suspect that
with quick decisions on the various characteristics, we could get this up
before the end of this week.  The custom coding to be done is very simple.

Doug
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bernhard Wagner" <loopdelightml@nosuch.biz>
To: <Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2003 9:55 AM
Subject: RE: Narrowing the field (Re: Currently available looper music
webpage)


> I set up a prototype
>
> http://www.xmlizer.biz/cgi-bin/LoopersDelightReviews/kwiki.cgi
>
> Bernhard
>