Hello there, everyone.

Unaccustomed as I am...etc etc. Seriously - there've been a few discussions recently on WOL that seem to be questioning the nature of what it means to 'engage' with a website. Whilst these have largely been resolved in a chummy enough fashion (and I do not wish to spark off a handbags-at-dawn situation), I wanted to at least air my thoughts.

To me, posting blogs and participating in discussions are only two ways of engaging with a website. I, personally, engage with the WOL site by:

1) Reading reviews
2) Checking the Poets' Showcase and following poets' links
3) Checking the Gig Guide
4) Reading the News features
5) Reading 'What I Do That's Different'
6) Occasionally looking at the Galleries
7) Reading other people's Discussions and Blogs

On average, I use the site about once a day, not just because it touches upon my life as a performance poet, but also because it is an invaluable resource for my day-job. I know Paul and most of the WOL team, and have nothing but admiration for what they've created here.

But even if I used the site less regularly, and wasn't personally acquainted with the team, and didn't do half the things I've listed above, I would not want to feel that WOL was somehow less 'mine'. It's an online community and my feeling is that it belongs to all of us.

I've noticed that a large number of people appearing in the Showcase are new to the writing/performing worlds. Some are very much at the putting-out-feelers stage. Aren't we in danger of frightening people off if we keep emphasising the need to make oneself conspicuous on the site?

I think we should spread our welcome as wide as possible and let everybody take what they want from the site. In the grand scheme of things, very few people are engaged in performance poetry compared to other artforms, and I think we should do our best to pull together.

Any feedback gratefully received.

With best wishes

R

Don't worry about it Russell

There are those in every merry band of bards who will allways clamour to comment, the multiloquent and verbose. Then of course there are others, those that are better at poetry.... it takes all sorts.

Gus

Thanks, Gus

I like your new photo, by the way.

R

Sorry Russell - I probably sparked all this off again after having resolved it amicably. I just found those 2 previous comments on POM a bit irritating. The one, a blatant advertisement for someone's book and services, the second one putting feelers out for next month's award. You were a worthy winner of the award and you are right to say that pressure should not be put on new joiners to conform to a pre-conceived idea of what a member should be. I just can't help feeling that certain people may be joining because they have been identified already as potential winners, with no intention of continuing beyond giving themselves a good publicity stunt. I may be wrong of course. I will shut from now on.

Hi again Isobel

Continued absence of hard feelings - but I thought it was an interesting topic to throw into the air for general feedback (not just contributing to discussions now, but starting them - whatever next?). With the rise of blogging and social networking, I think we're all having to realign, on an almost weekly basis, our understanding of how online communities work. Especially non-technical bods like myself.

I guess if we took a straw-poll of the people in the Poets' Showcase, we'd find a whole multiplicity of reasons for joining WOL - some undoubtedly more nudge-nudge than others. Personally, I don't think I'd even really noticed the POTM feature when I first joined WOL, but you could be right that it's a factor for some.

Anyway, good luck with WOLOP (great acronym, that). Maybe I'll actually meet you next time I'm up on the Wigan-Bolton axis.

All the best

R

It is a sad state of affairs when people feel they need to explain their interests in a website which encourages people from all walks of life and regardless of their experience/or not in the poetry performing arts, encourages inter-action between members.

We all have a love of poetry and varied interests on wol so will happily give our energies and spend time on the sections which interest us the most. When we feel pressured to join in, we are at risk of rushing to get round and often that is when things go awry and we have to come back to explain ourselves if we care enough which the majority and 'I' do here i'm glad to say.
For those who have lots of time available to engage in all the sections, great but we should also respect those who go out into the community events and gigs and spend as much time as they have and want to on the site. No-one here has more prominence or level of importance than another, not even the people who donate their life to it, eg Paul, Julian, Andrew and probably a few others we know little or nothing about.

Gus - when I said I didn't like your profile picture, it was because such handsome features like yours need to be seen face on and in focus. When I said you looked like a morphing Voldemort I wasn't taking the piss of your baldness - I happen to find baldness very attractive in certain men - much prefer it to the Friar Tuck look or the scrape over. Certainly don't want to be accused of 'baldism' - heaven forbid! Am I redeemed now Russell? Or have I engaged overly and incurred your scorn, Gus?

xx

Russell can I just say that this is an excellent discussion thread to raise and one that hasn’t been done before, in my experience.

Reading the comments of Paul on POM thread and you and Gus on this thread has certainly opened my eyes to other arguments. I have a big gob and like to express what I think - a northern trait I think. I have looked at this issue very subjectively. Perhaps I should explain my thinking.

My personal ethos is that you should put back into life/society exactly what you take out. I carry that through to every endeavour in my private, public life and WOL.
Most of us post on WOL for a reason – to be appreciated by the outer world, other wise we might as well leave all those poems stuck on the hard drive of our personal computers. The commentary boxes permit us to receive and give that feedback but too often it seems like a one- way flow of traffic. I just find that very selfish and hard to understand, particularly when the same poets are posting tons of it. WOL appears to have become a dumping ground for some very prolific poets. When I first joined there were not so many blogs and it was quite pleasant to look through them. Now when I visit blogs, I feel submerged, oppressed by the sheer number. It seems an impossible task keeping up with them and I have to just ignore certain names. It must be very hard for new poets to establish themselves because of this. WOL seems to be becoming a victim of its own success – to me personally that is. There are obviously poets out there who just want to read without commenting and poets who want to post without receiving feedback – I am just not one of them.

I take Gus’s point that over engagement can take the place of actually writing poetry. The time I spend on here is valuable time, that could easily be used elsewhere. It is a testament to the quality of the site that I make that time. Though I tend not to chat, I love being able to interact with fellow ‘thinkers’ through commentary and discussion. I would hate for that to be seen as something to be sneered at. A balance certainly has to be struck

Some people like to talk, some people don't. Some people get a lot of help from being active in a project or ongoing web thingy like the super WOL and some don't. As long as people don't go around upsetting the Apple cart then it seems OK to me. I think that sounds about right (well it does on my head,but who would want to live in my head ?). I think that the site does a lot for many.

Spencer

Bald??

Me????
No....Oh bloody no ... grief does it really show...
my god... and me a performance poet....

Is'nt life a bitch!!



XXXX

No Gus!
Life's a beach : )

Yes Francine, and Bobby Charlton is the most famous Beach comber over!

Win

Going to the original question, I feel that quite frankly it's not hard to spot what is working and what isn't. A good web developer will be able to track trends through the use of web statistics and thus how we the visitors are interacting with the site. I personally resist answer questions like 'what do you think of...?' or 'how often do you visit this page/use this service?' In this case I think that this site is one of those odd ones that I will want to interact with every-so-often.

WOL isn't on my RSS feeds and I certainly don't check it with any regularity, and the odd thing is I can't explain why it isn't one of the sites I check regularly......

Thanks, everyone, for taking the time to feed back on this potentially thorny topic. Special thanks to Paul for comprehensively tackling it last week on the ‘General/Poem Of The Month’ discussion-thread. Interesting to hear the administrators’ angle on it.

As Isobel says, there’s a very wide spectrum of users on here – those that seldom ‘give’ and those that seldom ‘take’ (such an ugly word, ‘take’) – and, whatever our personal tastes, I think we have to agree to disagree. And if we start drowning in blogs, we just have to hit the Off button.

I realise that we could be in danger of taking things onto a kind of Zen level – discussing the pros and cons of contributing to discussions – so I’ll sign off here. But really, ladies and gentlemen, should we perhaps be creating a new thread for some of these comments below (viz: ‘General/Hair’)?

Best wishes

R

PS: Isobel, redemption is yours.

Well, I only subscribed 10 minutes ago and so I am making my first tentative steps towards 'engaging' with the website. This is my first post.

The first thing I noticed is that the comments threads are upside down compared to those I am used to. This makes following them immediately irksome as you have to scroll down and read up.

I may learn to appreciate the difference this introduces...but I doubt it.

: )

Jxxx

Welcome to the merry band, John.

I first touched upon this site a mere five weeks ago, after Julian visited one of my sessions teaching asylum seekers and refugees, with the intention of breaking down the barriers of language through the medium of poetry. He said to me "do you write" , yes I do, or at that point I did 20years ago, my stengths (or so I thought, in literary form, were critical analysis and philosophy - I have a tendency to dogmatically tear things apart in order to look for an answer and then try and put it back together again, and if I don't find the answer then I the find satisfaction in putting it all back together, much like the inquisitive child who uncrews a toy in order to see how it works.)

I engaged with this site initially as a form of reasearch, but it inspired me to begin attempting to write again. Not brilliantly, but I hope my offerings to the blogs are at least average.

I fear that I may have created a monster when I started the dicussion thread about 'catharthis'. I enjoy engaging with the website and the people who have an opinion and are not afraid to express it, it makes for good discussion . However, I do react with some passion and 'vehemence' when when the slant of the discussion is at the expense of the majority of the users of WOL.
Maybe those of us who visit the site who think they are above the 'drivel' - and these are educated individuals - maybe they to pull their thumb from up their rear end and engage with a more suitable site. (maybe facebook?)

Hi John. Welcome to the site. I think you will find that some of the discussion threads are so long on this site that it works well to have the most recent at the top. Often there is a sizeable time gap before the issue boils over again. You would need an awful lot of stamina and time to thoroughly read them back to the root. More often than not I tend to read the most recent comments unless it is a very important issue. Having said that - I've never engaged with any other interactive website (even finding facebook not to my taste) so if I ventured beyond WOL, I might think differently.

Well, although it is not the orientation that I am used to...perhaps that is no bad thing? The 'cut up and rearrange' advice thread would suggest it is useful to have one's preconceptions disconcerted from time to time....so, I'll stop whingeing and just jump into the flow.


Good to be here!

: )

Jx

I thought that five weeks agoJohn. Good Luck! Hope you have tough enough skin and broad enough shoulders. Seriously though, for the main part, I must say I do enjoy it, and 'handbags at dawn' are a regular occurrence, and I am not just talking about the females - we come out with guns blazing. lol x