Playlouder - Music is the Network

it's fucking crap, desperately unintuative, way too complicated and no heads for album reviews. why oh why did you change it? it was the least snobby music source about, who else would give top 5 singles of the year placings to the sugagbabes, britney and all saints (other than pre teen pop mags) NME? Q? Mojo? would they bollocks. i loved playlouder, whats happened?

we have introduced a lot of new features and it does take a while to settle down

i don't think that we've introduced snobbiness - it's as snobby as the people who contribute

and we will look at ratings - it's something we've not known how to treat so far as each of us will rate things differently and for different reasons

i found it strange at first, but in fact its much much better

neilson123, the reason we are having an open development is to get insight as we build it what the users and people want. we arent trying to cater blindly for everyone who gives their toss, or their gold-dust ideas and points, for that matter. But we are expecting to develop something quite vast, powerful and impressive for all the music related activity we hope we can provide the best tools and space for.

additionally. we wont take any flak for changing the site. this is a dynamic enviroment, it changes, so will we. and we wont stop until we get it right and have you making a puddle on the floor ok?

My thoughts after a few weeks:

At the moment, its too much of a walled garden, even for someone who is interested in finding out what's inside. It's too difficult to find anything - three clicks to your top stories, unless I set all the writers to stalk. If I had never heard of Playlouder, but somehow stumbled across it, why would I sign up?

I would suggest a blog front-end with new written content, with the music and the community as the carrots for joining up.

All this assumes that Playlouder is still keeping up the journalistic side. However, if you are trying to be a social network designed to hook people into an internet service provider, that's a different matter.

yes - this is something we have been puzzling over as we want to give the users control

so we don't want to push any selected content at everyone. everyone should be able to choose the writers they want to follow

once you have selected people then you are one click away from the latest as it goes on your 'home' page which you get when you log in

we need to encourage the stalking - once people start it will be a very efficient way to organise the content - but i don't think we've made it as easy as we should

surely the front page should be content? otherwise any con.ent takes a while to find.. and it isn't as fun as reading it as the old format

we'll try to make it more fun - but we have to accommodate people who want to chat and listen to music as well as people who want to write and read, so our idea was to make the page you log into a collection of new stuff

ideally things you might be interesting would simply show up in front of you no matter what you are doing

you might think interesting, i meant

it's a club, and i feal alienated from it

it's a club, and i feal alienated from it

ooooh. its all different again (REFRESH !). its like "Michael Jackson - The Surgery Years", just as you get used to the way something looks, it all changes again

it's getting there i think

I would agree that the latest news and reviews should be obvious, and on the front page. Also, you should probably be auto stalking the old playlouder reporters when you sign up, or there should be some separate way to read their input

Baby it don't matter if you're black (one day) or white (the next)

Fresher presentation but still a little affectedly light couloured. (Not Jackson, the people/music/content... stuffs)

joe i looked at your profile it's kind of cool

th3james: we decided that autostalking would only make sense if you already knew who used to write for playlouder - as most members won't know who they are it would appear to be a random imposition

it realy pisses me off that when i read a revew, or article and want to comment on it i have to start a new chat. while this works wellfor the chat page (keeping it updated constantly) it means that i have to leave the actual review/article to write something about the review/article. why can't you just starta discussion under the actual article? it would make so much more sense

jesus, sorry about the typing there ^ !!

we did not want to restrict a chat to being just comments on a piece of content

if there are already chats attached to a bit of content, they'll show up at the bottom of the article though, so you don't necessarily havae to start a new one

how are you not restricting it to that by putting it in a different place though? a chat's a chat. i know the link shows up at the bottom, but if you want to talk about an article youre gonna want to reference that article. which is a pain in the arse if you have to open up a new browser just to read the original article. just my tuppence..

you can put a chat in the left panel

pescadito - you do start a chat and write about it on the same page as the article...? When you click Start A Chat it just expabds it underneath

oh really? how?

aha...

but that would require you to go to the chat

and then back to the content

yes - tim - something for the whiteboard - 'control bar' means nothing to anyone but us!

ah you see, i'm using firefox but can't actually drag the screen down far enough to read the chat box on the left hand side

you can move the boxes on the left too

put the chat at the top

it's not letting me drag it. i can move all the others

hmm

i wonder if that's a bug or a limitation

ahh, matt's right. if you refresh the page then you can drag it

just fixing it - it's because the widget is being added dynamically

but it's not recreating the sortable

should be fixed now

am I allowed to create any content that isn't about music? (ie. a "What's this about?" --. "oh, just stuff")

make what you like

http://playlouder.com/dhtml/#/content/new is not at all obvious! :)

cool, the chat thing works now

although some more URLencoding is needed on posting URLs ...

looks like it

if i have 2 chats on my control bar, and then try and scroll to the bottom of the page, I get some interesting visual flickering.

and can't scroll to the bottom

(FF2)

gavin, you can collapse things in your sidebar by clicking on the top of them, or you can drag them around so your important stuff is nearer the top

sure

but it went apeshit...

10Hz jumping around...

The side bar is supposed to scroll down the page to stay with you, so you can stash things into it and control the music as you browse. It is a bit glitchy in firefox though - we should probably turn off the dynamic movement in browsers which aren't fast enough to keep up

but the site is much better than befor, appart from the fact we are now told to work while others reap in the dosh