Re: Subject: Re: [Harp-L] looking for a new home...

[fjm <bad_hat@xxxxxxxx>]

Obligatory harmonica content.  That we have Rob P here sharing his work 
with us is extraordinary.  He is one of my favourite chromatic harmonica 
players.  That he is willing to share with us is just amazing. If you do 
attend SPAH later this summer you can't go wrong by attending Rob's 
workshop on transitioning to chromatic from diatonic.

That the discussion is taking place on harp-l and not Slidemeister is 
telling.  When harp-l was the only game in town and the harmonica centre 
of the universe there was a lot of chromatic harmonica discussion.  For 
many reasons the harmonica world has re-balkanised. We've roped 
ourselves off into little topic specific universes again.  Slidemeister 
has indeed become very successful.  A more recent addition to the mix is 
Adam Gussow's Modern Blues Harmonica site.   The Dirty-South Blues 
Harmonica forum having siphoned off a large chunk of harp-l's daily 
traffic.  Vituperation as  high art is just one of the many interesting 
topics you will find there.

I think a lot of the appeal of the forum style format is the segregation 
that can occur within a group.  You can just read your topic specific 
interests and ignore the rest.  The ability to insert inline videos and 
media is also a draw.  Time will tell, might could be the days of a 
simple text only e-mail format discussion list are numbered.

The politeness of  conversations and the appropriateness of language 
have both been mentioned as possible reasons for some of the previous 
migration to more topic specific harmonica groups.  Perhaps but I think 
it really had more to do with large cultural issues that were expressed 
as being about "bad" words.  I also think those particular problems have 
been largely solved.  An interesting aside, Slidemeister found that it 
did not work for their members to have political discussions within the 
forum.  I'm not sure if it's a universal truth but they've never worked 
here either.  fjm