MeFi Projects

April 26, 2001 1:13 PM

MeFi Projects: It could just be another message board under Metatalk - but I think there's a lot of creative people who meet at Mefi and it would be inappropriate to post projects to the main page. So maybe a subpage for that?
posted by owillis to feature requests at 1:13 PM (20 comments total)

all for that, maybe then i wont feel akward asking for tech tips in that weblogs section :P ...
posted by a11an at 2:36 PM on April 26, 2001

This has been brought up before... recently, in fact (man! I wish that MetaTalk had search and/or I wasn't so lazy). And there's quite a bit of support for the concept. But as far as I can tell from reading the threads, people are leery of having self-linking going on anywhere but in the personal profiles.

I, for one, would love to go through member profiles and check out their homepages and the like... but current infrastructure is pretty weak in the member info area. Rightly so, since that isn't MeFi's focus. Maybe with a little more cash, Matt might be persuaded to spend some time on that. If/When that happens, I'd love to see a couple of things happen: An actual member's area that is easily searchable and has some way of notifying interested parties that homepages are listed, that a profile has been filled out, number of links posted, number of comments made, maybe even an area for all those (otherwise) annoying "I have a question about X" posts we get... not to mention maybe a field for current locale, which would be enlightening to see where everyone's coming from (literally and figuratively), and would facilitate the get-togethers that so many of us seem to crave.

It's a lot to ask for. And I don't expect much will be done in these secondary (tertiary?) arenas until more MeFiers are willing to drop some coins in the proverbial guitar case... (on that note, Matt... is there any other way we can send donations to you that won't feed us to the Amazon Juggernaut?).
posted by silusGROK at 3:56 PM on April 26, 2001

I agree, MeFi projects section is a great idea. For that matter, so is an ask MeFi section.

But I think Matt already pointed out that he's having trouble managing things as they are.

Delegation of editorial capability? Is that what we really need now?
posted by dhartung at 6:37 PM on April 26, 2001

As an interim solution, I'm willing to organize a weekly mailing of MeFi members who have new projects to announce.
posted by kindall at 7:53 PM on April 26, 2001

OK, I decided it was time to get something going, so I set up the mailing list in question this evening. I'm running it out of Entourage for now, so there may be a few minutes' lag in processing subscription requests.

To receive weekly announcements of new MetaFilter member projects, send any message to [e-mail]. The welcome message contains instructions for submitting announcements.

I'll put up a fancy-schmancy Web page for all this this weekend, probably.
posted by kindall at 12:11 AM on April 27, 2001

Supercool. WTG kindall
posted by owillis at 3:52 AM on April 27, 2001

I assume this is announcements only, and not free-form discussion?

What does the "on" part mean? (Expecting to have to say "d'oh" when I hear the answer.)
posted by rodii at 6:16 AM on April 27, 2001

It gets you "on" the list . There's a mefi-projects-off for getting "off" the list.

Shorter than "subscribe" and less prone to speling erors. (Having run mailing lists before, let me just say you would be shocked at the number of ways otherwise intelligent people can find to misspell "subscribe" and especially "unsubscribe." And then they will write to say, "UNSUSCIBE ME DAMMIT! I HAVE TRIED THREE TIMES AND THE DAM MACHINE KEEPS IGNORING ME!")

I've seen some other lists use the on/off convention so I decided to use it here seems like it will save a lot of hassle.

Right now, yes, it's announce-only. I figure, if something is really super-cool and warrants further discussion, someone can post it to MeFi and we can talk about it there. However, once this has been up and running a little while and we see how much traffic we get, I'm certainly not averse to making the list open to discussion.
posted by kindall at 8:39 AM on April 27, 2001

WTG Kindall! Count me in...
posted by silusGROK at 9:07 AM on April 27, 2001

I do hope, I should add, that people will use discretion in which links from the weekly mailing they post to MeFi proper. MetaFilter has a policy against self-links to prevent it from being taken over by announcements for members' sites. Let's keep to that spirit. The last thing we need is more clutter on MeFi's front page. If you think another member's site deserves more exposure, maybe you should consider posting it to your own site or in a relevant MeFi thread, rather than going straight to the front page.
posted by kindall at 9:10 AM on April 27, 2001

D'oh!
posted by rodii at 1:08 PM on April 27, 2001

I do hope, I should add, that people will use discretion in which links from the weekly mailing they post to MeFi proper.

Since it's really more of a MeFi offshot than a actual part of MeFi, would it be reasonable for it to have a specific person acting as "delegate to MeFi" or something? A person (or two) that would be "allowed" to post list projects to MeFi Front Page? Anyone else posting from the list could be shouted down for meta-selfposting? I know it seems sort of limiting to send out neat sites with the stipulation that no one may post them here, but I too am a little worried about the increasing weight of the Front Page.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw it out there.
posted by Lirp at 7:09 PM on April 29, 2001

Let's see how it goes first. My inclination is to start as simple as is reasonable and add more rules as they become necessary. It seems to have worked for MeFi. The reason the prohibition against posting to the front page is there at all is that Matt specifically brought that point up in his e-mail to me, and I wanted to assure him that this little side project wouldn't increase the noise at MeFi.

If Matt happens to sign up for the list (he might have already, I haven't checked) and he wants to decide what is worthy of posting to the front page of MeFi himself, I'd say that's his prerogative. Otherwise we'll figure something else out when it comes up.

BTW, I threw up a quickie Web form for subscribing this evening. It ain't pretty, but it works. (You might say it has a kind of "early Mosaic" feel to it...)
posted by kindall at 9:41 PM on April 29, 2001

So how many people have signed up? How are you going to publicize it?
posted by rodii at 4:19 PM on April 30, 2001

We had about 20 when I left for work this morning. But that was before Matt posted a link to it on the sideblog. It'll be interesting to see how that washes out.

As for promoting, I think what we have so far -- a sideblog mention, plus enough people who know about it to mention it when someone posts a self-link -- is a pretty good start.

I'm mulling over some other ideas for making this a true outgrowth of the community, rather than just a prosthesis. The mailing list is kind of a temporary measure, I'm sure it'll evolve.
posted by kindall at 5:15 PM on April 30, 2001

Why, so it is. ;)
posted by kindall at 9:10 AM on May 1, 2001

BTW, we've got 65 people on it now! Behold the power of the sideblog.
posted by kindall at 9:15 AM on May 1, 2001

The list made it to a nice round 100 members this evening.
posted by kindall at 1:59 AM on May 4, 2001

Where's the list at now? (I have a feeling that this may never be answered)
posted by j.edwards at 2:20 AM on January 5, 2002