Growing Pains

[Gary Portenier]

As Top 40 Charts continues to grow there will be a natural tendency for listeners to want to more easily distinguish between, artists, genre, stations, and fans. Right now, unless there is a feature I have missed, you have to go through the member list one by one. While there is an All Artist discussion group like this one, I'm not sure listeners, especially first time visitors, would logically go to groups to begin to make those distinctions. Are there plans to enable participants to easily break the Members list into categories like genre, stations, etc.? Does anyone else think this would be helpful?

Gary

[MysteryBill'sMagicRadio]

I would like to think that new visitors might be encouraged to start here in this group. Maybe this group could be advertised as a good place to start! (main page plug?) My artist page is separate with my stuff in the playlist. My site here is a playlist of a tune or two from a whole bunch of people, and I'm hoping that a visitor might check it out as a way to sample the diversity of this site for starters! So my point is, the members of this group should build their playlists (however they want) so we can become somewhat of an information booth. Is this making sense?

[Gary Portenier]

Bill, you make a good point that I had not fully thought threw. Specifically, using groups as a vehicle for listeners to discover the diversity of music on this site does makes some sense. The longer people remain at Top 40 Charts, the greater the variety of music and artists they will discover. However, since participation in groups is not restricted in any way, and I'm not suggesting that they should be, Top 40 Charts could end up with most groups being made up of "the usual suspects" without an easy to maintain focus. But things will sort themselves out over time. My main point is that the easier it is for people to understand and navigate a site, the more productive the site is likely to be.

[Kickradio]

Sorry it took so long to answer this one....Been busy as you know. We went ahead and changed the profiles to allow artists and songwriters to categorize their primary music style(s) and this, in turn, allowed us to put an "Advanced" search mode on the "Members" page where the genre has a drop down style menu to allow for genre searches.

[Gary Portenier]

Rob, I have been impressed that you have been continuing to expand and improve features and options here at Top 40 Charts, including the number of choices you've been adding to the "Advanced" search feature. I can see how much you've been working on, including the Kickradio shows, so no apology is necessary. Keep up the good work!