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Old 2008.10.28, 02:43 PM   #5
Glathannus
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: United States
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I think the categories of discussion that should get their own subforums, are the ones with the most massive threads. A videogames subforum is almost long overdue. Sports? Not so much (but I could be biased because I don't participate in that discussion).

I'm divided on whether or not we should have a Product Reviews board for related artists. Very divided. But it's an idea I've been pondering for quite awhile. Some of the artists Shiina Ringo involves herself with, have huge backcatalogs that many of us are familiar with, but we have no organized place to talk about it. My borderline fear is that if we set this up, we will attract new user registrations from people who have never been interested in Shiina Ringo. It's something we might want to hide from people who aren't yet registered, but...

Do you have any idea how much it would raise this community's site rank at Google and other search engines, to start up all those threads? You type "Heart Bazaar" into Google and we are #2, right below Wikipedia (though if you try Kanji it's a very different story). For the related artists who are still active, could you just imagine our site showing up in Google right below the artist's official website? I still want Shiina Ringo to be the central theme of this community, but if we are easy enough to find while people search for information on other artists, eventually we will spark more people into asking the question "Just who is this Shiina Ringo, and what is she all about?". We might be able to promote her around the world better than her own official website(s) can.

The problem is giving curious visitors a way to preview the music before they buy, without us getting in trouble. Apparently Kronekodow Ltd isn't going to grant any fansites any permissions for anything. So even if we had an elaborate setup of 32kbps WMA streaming samples (which wouldn't take away any incentive to buy the CDs), we'd still be "breaking the law". So the question is... do we care, and more importantly, do we think EMI or JASRAC or Kronekodow is actually going to care?

Whether or not we convert fans of related artists into Shiina Ringo fans, could be less important than how easy our community is for existing Shiina Ringo fans to find. If we can raise our site rank from related artists, we actually become even easier to find in a "Shiina Ringo" search. Currently we are on Page 7 of the results, and more than half of the results inbetween are garbage. WebRing-whoring isn't the exclusive method to bump ourselves ahead.
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