The Petra Zone

You guys have probably noticed the "Recently Played Tracks" list I've added to my signature recently. This is courtesy of Last.fm, which is a social networking site, sort of like Facebook or MySpace, but centered exclusively around music. One of the primary functions of Last.fm is tot alk to your computer and record for posterity whatever you're listening to on Windows Media Player or whatever. It keeps the list, and after a while it can link you to other users who have similar musical interests, or if can find other bands that you might be interested in. See my profile here: TulsaMJ

So anyway, in light of Micah's recent announcement that the Zone is causing him some trouble, it occurred to me that we could consider moving the Zone permanently to Last.fm. I've even set up an example Petra Zone group on Last.fm: http://www.last.fm/group/The+Petra+Zone

The "Discussions" area is where forum-like posts will go. If we decide to go that way and if you guys get the Last.fm software on your computers and start letting it record your song listens, over time the forum will develop play charts of its own, and we'll be able to see what the most popular music listened to by Zoners overall is (hope it's Petra! hehe) One downside: only one discussion area, so the other subdivisions of the Zone will have to move to their own "group" areas.

The group is only a sample; it will automatically be deleted after a certain amount of time if we don't use it, so if we decide that we don't want to do it, that's fine. But I wanted to throw it out there as a possibility. Another advantage: it might allow us to attract more new fresh members to the group. Seems like we've gotten stagnant since Petra's retirement. Last.fm already has a lot of "members" and all we have to do is find 'em and get 'em to join up (easy... visit Petra's profile page and recruit from the "weekly top listeners").

If you join Last.fm and start scrobbling your music plays, add TulsaMJ to your friends list!

With all due respect... thats not a good idea. Starting another forum maybe, but closing this one would be sad.. like I said its not the Zone itself, its 5 years or so of Data, and search engines love this stuff. I think a new forum now Petra has retired, would be dismal. just my 2 cents

If you read Micah's post, he's planning on probably losing the data anyway. But I would think there is the possibility that we could leave this site here as an artifact but shut down all posting. Maybe that will take care of the problems that Micah has been having.

Would moving make the domain name irrelevent?

It's coming due for renewal in a month....

I wouldn't drop the domain name, no. It's on the search engines and in people's bookmarks... it would be a shame to lose all those connections. We could always point it at the new site, or if Micah was willing to leave these pages up with the posting turned off, we could leave it pointing here with a post of instructions how to get there.