Dear members,

 

I've been thinking about the Harpsichord list and Facebook etc.

 

When I was young and beautiful (hey, I'm still all of that!), we had a
"harpsichord list" in Flanders which was distributed by snail mail. Mark I
said "Flanders" not "Belgium". For those who are not in touch with our
confusing local politics: Belgium is so small that we thought it very
necessary to divide it into at least 2 regions: a Flemish (not Dutch!)
speaking region and a Walloon (not French!) speaking part. There is also a
lesser known German speaking part (yes, they speak German!). Going into
details will give everyone a headache including me. So to make a long story
short: at the time when birds were still capable of speech, I approached the
lady who was responsible at that time for the Flemish Harpsichord List
(updated every 3 months, I've you'd paid your allowance for the stamps,
basically 3 harpsichords on sale and always the same ones) and I proposed to
create a much broader list: the World Wide Keyboard Bank on the
INTERNET(!!!) were anyone could put his/her instrument for sale, for free
and visible from all over the world (don't forget we used relatively
expensive dial-up modems at that time). This met with absolute horror:
"Strangers will buy _our_ harpsichords!!!" When I pointed out the we could
also buy the harpsichords of the "stranger's" as well, I met with a wall of
silence. Up to this day, the dialogue with this person is a bit difficult
:-) To conclude my rant: consolidation is not a bad idea! 

 

Anyway, FB is top notch when one wants to show what one has eaten lately and
share this info with grandma/pa/whoever. In other words: ongoing discussions
which have no value over time but are fun the share on a very short time
span.

 

The List (capital L) is different as it keeps an archive of the
conversations and these archives can be searched. In my opinion, the List
can be made even stronger by compiling useful knowledge into a single
topics. Surely nowadays with "Big Data" being all around there must exist
useful algorithms than can do this fully automated? 

 

My biggest complaint when searching the archives is that I have so many hits
that I can't find the relevant information I'm looking for. Bill complained
about people not looking through the archives and up to a point he's 100%
right. But please go to the search engine and type: jack design => 253
matches. Really: do we need to read 253 articles to get to the point of a
well-made jack design?

 

There should be some topic e.g.: Jack design. With the subtitles: Problem
shooting, Which wood is good/not good, etc. not all these separate unordered
thoughts.

 

End of rant. FYI: the weather here in Gent was extremely nice this weekend.
As a consequence I hardly played on my harpsichord but I did hit the organ
at a (cooler) church. This count as a redemption I hope ;-)

 

Sunny greetings,

 

Chris.


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