Magne joined musicmoz a year ago. Since then, he has edited in most parts
of the directory, sent a barrage of feature requests to rpfuller and developed
many interesting personalities that live inside his head. He also edits some
music-related categories in the Open Directory Project. In this e-mail interview
with himself he discusses some of his thoughts about Musicmoz, a sister-site
of the Open Directory Project. When reading this interview, it's important
to remember that he has a rather bizarre sense of humour.
G'day sir!
Yeah, I was. I asked rpfuller for some advice, and after I removed the threatening references to France and the UN it got accepted pretty quickly. It was a dull application with very little comedic value.
I had already been an ODP editor for some years, so I was familiar with the general idea of these directories. When I first looked at my editor dashboard it looked strangely familiar, and so did Regional/Europe/Norway/, my first category, since I already edited the equivalent over at the ODP. I don't know what my initial thoughts were, but I think "potential" is the key word. Since I have worked for some years as a discjockey/journalist at local radio stations in Norway and Kosovo, I have a great interest in music, so I guess MusicMoz appealed to me.
The strength of MusicMoz is the content we are able to create using the various templates in Bands_and_Artists/, Releases/ and Composition/Composers. Lately, we have added a lot of new features for these templates, and we plan to make similar templates for other trees in the future. I think that is one of the things that separates us from the ODP, we don't only link to other resources, we build our own.
No, not at all. She had two sites in the Norway category, and I thought the category had some potential. At that time I wasn't too familiar with profile editing, so I just added a lot of content where I thought it would fit. In retrospect I see that good artist profiles require a lot of work, and that I did a lot of silly mistakes in that category. The interesting thing with the choice of category is that I don't like Wenche Myhre at all (I used to have nightmares about her when I was in kindergarten.) It was just a coincidence.
Yeah, my pet project. Well, most of my editing experience from the ODP was in World/Norsk, so I thought it would be a good idea to start something similar in MusicMoz. I had some great visions of what it could be, and I still think it is a good idea, but it hasn't been very active lately. We had a lot of editors participating in the project earlier this year, but I think the air went out of the balloon after some months. That said, the directory has improved a lot since then, and it is possible to built a multi-lingual music directory with some fresh blood. Most of the tools are ready, we only need more editors.
Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures!
Ah, I see you're not a Kubrick fan?
Are you going to start an argument here?
I've got at least four of my personalities on my side, and I don't think your feeble chums can beat John McTerror, Ronny the Ravenous Android, Vinnie the Walrus and Connie the Curmudgeon!
I was young, foolish and that was last week. Besides, I found her lyrics
about teenage problems very insightful and poetic.
Mmm... comfy chair... It's so good it must be fattening... well... it probably is since I spend so much time in it.
Well, I first noticed a lot of new categories on my dashboard, so I checked my request log. When I was finished cleaning the coffee stains from the wall and monitor, calming the cat and hyperventilating, I went on IRC and bragged a bit about it. I always thought I would say something smart, but the IRC logs reveal that my first words were:
[23:01] <magne-ZZzz> heh
[23:01] <magne-ZZzz> Wow
[23:01] <magne-ZZzz> lots of links on my dashboard :)
That's it. I didn't even get time to write a speech.
Well, before I got the permissions I thought all editalls were super-editors that knew everything. Once I got them myself, I discovered that you learn more after you get the permissions than before. It is also a lot of work, since you practically need to read every forum post there is to keep yourself updated on what's going on. It is also nice to be able to correct errors or add interesting URLs anywhere in the directory, even though I don't have time to fix everything I see.
It is also rewarding to accept new editors, see how their editing improves, and get a "thankyou" when I give them feedback on their editing. The sad part is that some editors don't want to follow the guidelines, or give abusive feedback. If we don't see any solutions to that, we have to remove them. That is always the last resort though.
That's for me to know and you to have wild, demented dreams about. Let's just say we talk a lot about trout. It isn't worth many conspiracy theories, most of the stuff is dull and boring, but it is nice to have a place to discuss new applications, etc.
Well, I plan to get more education, right now my interest lies in archives, so I'm probably going to go to study that at an university in a few years. Right now I'll try to pass puberty.
22... and 10/12th.
Your face?
DOH!
- magne