wwp@yahoogroups.com:
another from Facebook
Don Bain 2013-Feb-12 18:44:00
And another (but you can't expect me to keep doing this...).
Bj?rn K?re Nilssen said:
I love the WWP concept, but as a former participant in the WWP I can tell you that the main reason why I lost interest was the feeling of sending panos into a black hole, mainly because of the lack of a mechanism for comments/feedback. No way to comment and discuss panos, neither your own nor others. IMHO in these days of focus on social media this simply isn't good enough. You could always share a pano-URL on Twitter etc, but adding share buttons for the most common sites/tools would make this threshold a lot smaller.
To get more visible you need to be linked to. A search for worldwidepanorama on Google doesn't show a direct link to a page on the org site until on page 3, while it should really have been on top of page 1?
Wider pages/images and a real full fullscreen option would be nice too, to keep new and old visitors coming back.
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I replied:
Bj?rn, you make good points here, and are not alone in feeling we could do better to showcase our efforts.
Comments have been considered several times, and rejected as antithetical to the community-building and positive nature of the WWP. Unedited comments from the general public on other sites include a high proportion that are mean-spirited or just plain stupid. It was agreed that if we were to add user comments to the WWP they would need to be screened first, or at least soon after posting. In addition to being a huge and endless task, that would open a whole new can of worms about freedom of expression. So we dropped it.
Adding buttons to automatically share (and comment) using Facebook or similar is definitely a possibility. I think it should be fairly easy to implement and integrate into a new site design. The Panoramic Photographers on Facebook group would be a start for discussion by those already involved with the medium. Sharing on individuals' personal pages could result in a lot of new interest and bring traffic to the WWP site.
Our SEO at one time was excellent, we had high page rankings, and some of our participants even got work from the free publicity. But the search engines' methodologies change continuously and we have not kept up. Again, this should be a fairly easy thing to implement - if we can figure out what actually needs to be done.
As to "real" fullscreen, I assume you mean image pages with no text, menu bar, or navigation. As an option on the existing fullscreen window, this might make sense. But I really object to panoramas appearing with no caption at all, the information value of the picture is severely compromised. One of the core principles of the WWP is that panoramic photos have real and lasting value because they show a specific place (usually), at a specified time, as visualized and recorded by a particular person.
Let's keep the discussion going. And, BTW, thanks for volunteering to edit the comments!