I'm having some difficulty navigating. I tried finding Tom Gerace's article, "Preview of the New Gather." by searching on his name. 130 results came up, but none on the first page with this article.
I've searched my articles, most read, most discussed, some recent comments, recent articles, recent images, and I've looked at my inbox and my email notifications.
I'm glad I never turned off my notifications. It gives me a very good idea of what is coming through the transom.
The New Gather is very attractive, a bit different from what I expected (what did I expect? I don't know, honestly).
I'm not sure how easy it will be to navigate to find articles I want to read.
I think I'll have to try my usual method: check my email for notifications of articles being published or comments being made, then check the top 50 of most read, most commented, recent articles, articles by specific people and also the
Recent Articles, My Network, and other margin notes.
Oh, the margin has disappeared. There was a real wealth of information in that left margin. Maybe Gather can reinstate the left margin.
The left margin was where I did a substantial amount of my browsing for reading material.
I have no idea, for example, where to find other articles Gatherers may have written tonight on The New Gather.
What do you all think?
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Comments: 114
1. The number of votes has been removed from the overall article rating. WHY???? This is important. This gives you an idea of how the average was arrived at.
2. I thought they'd have more personalization and customization. I'm very disappointed by that. Supposedly, I was going be able to customize my group pages and everything. Can't see how to do it.
3. Still no way to easily bookmark and track my favorite articles. How HARD could that be to implement?
4. The home page now seems geared towards Gather controlling the editorial content, probably to focus on their "real" authors instead of the unwashed masses. A little bit of that is OK...but too much is WAY UNCOOL.
5. The new comment box is annoying.
Otherwise, I do like the tabs and the fact that it's easier to see the most read as opposed to just the highest rated.
Still, I was really also hoping to see something like "sort by ratings" so I could also read the LOWEST rated. Some of the lowest rated articles are sure to be interesting for a variety of reasons.
The comment box detracts from the comment itself and seems hokey.
But the larger font in the comment box, publishing tool and in finished article is a good improvement.
Much harder to navigate. I had no trouble with the old one, but a lot of functionality has been lost, not added.
Have not been to the home page, yet.
I am interested in why Gather removed the number of votes for the rating.
Also, the Amazon Contest is calculated on highest rated by number of votes, yes?
I'd like to see the lowest rated articles, too. I've got some in there. I was able to find how many 10 articles I have...that was interesting...
Should be better sorting...I like the improvement of sorting "Groups I own" within "My Groups". I'm always hunting to get to my groups that require my modification.
Should be better sorting of my articles. I think I still have to wade through pages to get to my earlier articles.
man this really sucks-- and no pics on the side to see what other images are up
to9ns of wasted space every where and especially at the top--this sucks
Mary, agreed - I liked all the other pics. I like a plethora of information, which we had with the old Gather.
Custom magnification would be great.
The comment box detracts in a big way.
Mandi, I heard there was a focus group recently in Boston. Do you mean that or something else? When were you interviewed? 12 is a very small sample number.
What I don't like is that I feel a bit cut off from all of you. The other gather felt a lot like a playground. You know? Like, there's Jimmy on the slide. It was almost like phyical contact. This feels more like a room. Like I'm sitting on my bed calling people on the phone. So, I never see them. It feels less personable.
- Better navigation to articles of interest. Gather still has not found the fit there.
- Customizable filters so that I can quickly find articles of interest without being blinded by things I have little interest in.
- A bozo filter to spare me having to view the comments of those few who have not quite matured.
who dreamt of this monster. this really sucks. eally impedes any quick navigation at all. and so much wasted space-- like they have to go to extremes over there. the other layout was crowded, but all they had to do was some small adjestments to make it easier to navigate
but this is just downright klutzy, disgusting, repellant, crappy, hideous--
hideous, now that's really a good word for it
and with tons of wsted space
and whoever can read black or charcoal on white for any length of time without going blind?
was this professioally done? or maybe they're trying to imitate the very juvenile Cambridge beginning ESL books
ugh--erally total ugh
Just glancing at the layout and the buttons, it looks more intuitive to me... and I like the list of topics down the left side. I'm guessing that you can find the recommendations you were used to on the Home page... I just don't know where yet.
I'm going to give it a little time before I decide thumbs up or down.
Good point about the bozo filter, Greg.
Joshua, what in the sciences would be a statistically significant number on which to draw a focus group upon based on a membership of 30,000?
Mandi said in her article she was one of 12. I responded by saying that is a statistically insignificant number on which to make recommendations, and think Gather should have used the commonly used methods in science and social science, of getting representative sampling..
A number much higher than 12. I know Boston had a focus group on something related to Gather recently,but I was not there and I don't know what it was about. I might be still under wraps, for all I know.
I applaud focus groups and think it is good for Gather to do this, but I think they threw out the baby with the bath water.
It does feel more like 'my playground' and less of a larger pool.
I think Gather wanted more editorial control, but the home page doesn't change what people will log on to read, rate and discuss. The new home page doesn't change or promote anything new. The old home page did not have a lot of viewers to the Editor's Pick aritlces, relative to the number of people who read them in the General Gather.
When notificed, I always tried to go over to Editor's Pick and comment, while it was still a pick. But I was not always aware that someone was made Editor's Pick, unless I was emailed.
Regardless, you all do bring up a good point, this site looks like it is trying too hard to be gen-ex. Instead, it looks like it just walked off Sesame Street.
About the editorial control thing, I am not bothered by that so much. If you notice, you pretty much skip right over the gather homepage when you get to the site. You go from there to your page from login, and I think that's why it feels more like my site rather than our site. But consider this, you put this article up, and within seconds you had about 5 comments on it. Now, that didn't happen so easily on the old gather. Everyone is saying that it is harder to navigate, but it seems, evidentially, that you are all finding it a bit easier to get from here to there than you may think.
A couple of months ago, the most common tags were: random musings, gather, writing, us politics, family, love, and so on....
Now, the tags are very generic. Perhaps that may help with the search function, but people will still use their own tags.
Does this mean that tags will not be dynamic? That they will not change?
Are the featured tags ones that were selected by ? whom?
Not sure what it means "try your own tag".
Does this mean our own tags will not get into the system? Unclear about this.
Still need to find Tom's article.
I had waited for Recommended Articles and also for notifications from my inbox for this function.
Tonight, I found an article by someone I had emailed with earlier today and she had mentioned she would be writing on this topic.
But if I had missed this listing tonight, I would have searched under her name to see if she had published it.
This is the same, but I really do miss the plethora of informaiton.
I think it will lead to a lot more duplication of articles and topics, without the benefit of people discovering what others are saying and writing about.
A lot of people have turned off their notifications. How do they find out what is being talked about?
The night I joined, January 15, was right after the short story contest. I had posted a very short story.
I logged onto several of the sections (we had sections) then and read some of the entries.
Like the Articles section now up, the sections consisted of articles listed in order of appearance.
I only bookmarked "Storytelling" becuase that is where a lot of people I knew seemed to publish to.
Of the changes that Gather has made in the 6 months I've been here, this is the biggest.
It is also the one that seems to spark the most debate.
Apparently, Juliet Capulet, my icon, has been decaptiated.
I think that, since the "New Gather" has arrived, the "preview" article might have become redundant. Only Tom knows for sure.
but then - how would you know if you've published anything, greg?
G'night.
Gather has now a whole new set of problems to deal with; the new Gather home page is no different than before, with Editor's Picks. I find few people go to Gather homepage or gather.com. to find material.
People come to see what is on "Gather" not what the Gather management believes should be seen.
I thought Gather was going for more of a 'newspaper' look and feel.
This has no identifiable look and feel - Gather is running against current thinking in 'brand' typing, in making so radical a change here.
I'm really wondering why the change was so drastic.
I see the dhanges as different - not better, but different.
I also noticed the most recent 'sign-ins' are listed. Not new members, but people in my network who have signed in.
Sometimes I like to sign in but not comment or make myself appear 'visible' immediately.
Now, we are visible as soon as we sign in.
5 articles are about the new Gather - Jake S., mine here, Mandi G., one by Marina G. and Will Evans' article.
Of the other 26 aritlces published since midnight, only Jake S.' s other article about WWIII has any substantial number of comments.
Essentially, only 4 articles were commented upon last night. Granted, a lot of people were and still are asleep.
A few articles have one or 2 comments, and one has 18 comments. But I think there is a lot less commenting going on as people sleep, relative to other nights. My email notifications is much, much quiet.
Marina G. and Will Evans are likely not even aware that other articles have been published about Gather.
This is part of the duplication I was mentioning last night.
I think the new Gather is somehow unfiar to people who are not that well known, in that it makes their article even less noticeable than before.
Before, people stood a chance of being noticed with their original notification and the notifications of those in their network.
Add to the 'recent articles' list and that increased the chances of readership for new members, that way, also.
Some 'recent' articles were also 'recomended articles' so that increased the chances of new articles to be noticed, there, too.
I will now go over to Will's article and comment, while also alerting him to the discussions going on here, at Jake's and at Mandi's aritlcle.
I'll do the same with Marina G.'s article, too.
Aha! I heard somewhere that the median age of gather members is 43. They want to make sure we can read without our bifocals on!
Two more articles (making it a total of 50 have been published about Gather. I will now provide the link.
http://www.gather.com/
viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976766896
http://www.gather.com/
viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976766891
Absolutely necessary that this be reinstated.
http://www.gather.com/
viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976766868
Mandi's:
http://www.gather.com/
viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976766875
Just kidding about all this....Thanks for sharing to make this easier.
If Gather reduced the thickness of the orange border around comment boxes, reinstated the email notification on the page we're on (so we don't have to go to mygather or mail just to see if we have mail), reinstated the left margin, I might be able to live with this....
It is way more different than I expected, way more...I thought they were going for a version change, rather than a 'brand' change.
The only thing I really miss is the old "homepage" It felt like the front of a newspaper. This feels more like a magazine or (gasp) interactive website. - LOL -
Old Gather, I miss ya already.
It was a good four months. Movin' on...
His article A Preview of the New Gather is here:
And Jake's article, here. I do encourage people to visit the different articles; The comments are not the same, by any means. (some are, but many offer pespectives unique to each author).
Jake's article:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976766868
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976766868
Many authors still have 0 comments on articles posted since midnight. Oh, I know it's only 9 :33 EDT, but still...
I do think the new design makes it easier to Search Articles and just go down the line seeing what's been published.
I do miss the margin.
Tom mentioned in his article (above) that the new design is more extensible, so hopefully Gather can build back in some of the functionality they lost.
I liked the RA because I usually had it in my mind to comment on a specific article from the past I had forgotten about. Usually, I had forgotten the author or the title, but just generally wanted to comment on it...
Another thing that has bugged me forever. This is a web site, is it not? Then why is it so web unaware? When a link is put into an article, why is it not shown as a link? It takes one line of code on the server side to do that! Like I said in Will's comments: WEB 101 people.
I was indeed critical of elements of the old site too. We're all experts at what WE want. But I learned 20 years ago as a developer it doesn't matter what I want, it matters what the majority of users want. Instinct after 20+ years developing causes me to doubt this is it.
Gather has a small staff. I suspect that has a lot to do with a lot of things.
A repost:
Here is Will Evan's excellent discussion:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976766896
If you delve into old articles, I think you'll find a lot of gatherers (not gatherites, come on peoples) don't know any HTML. That's why I'm glad hardcoding is not required.
Now, I do know HTML, so the reason I like it for myself is a bit different. The reason I'm appreciative of gather's decision to not to allow HTML in their articles (though I do miss some elements of customization). The reason I like it is because I've done some writing of tuturials on gather for HTML. Now, you must know some HTML, or you wouldn't have brought this up, if I were to write a tutorial for how to put links in your comments or your articles, I wouldn't be able to simply include the harcoding.
In order to say a hyperlink is coded like this, I couldn't write:
<a href="http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976766869" >some site</a>
Now, what I just coded looks like
<a href="http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976766869"&>some site</a>
This post alone took 10 minutes to write. I had to look up all the symbol codes. And that would make it even harder for people if everytime they wanted to put a greater than sign or a less than sign they had to go look up the coding for it.
I still feel that there should be a place that displays articles that have been posted to groups you are a member of listed together in chronological order so you can see all the articles posted to your groups since your last visit to the site. Would anyone else like to have a page like that?
He has another article now up discussing the videos available for tour on the new gather.
I'm getting used to it, but I miss color, recent articles, various features.
A huge number of articles are pulblished on Gather every day. I had no idea.
Soon it will be 500 in the last 12 hours, since midnight.
The most efficient way I've found for me to find articles being published or commented on is via my Earthlink mailbox.
I do worry however as time passes how I will find an article trying to use the search engine.
In fact, that query has sort of come up already. Someone asked me to look for an article (in Amazon Shorts actually) knowing only the title and subject matter. In Amazon Shorts, there is no way but scrolling and clicking.
The Gather search engine needs to be improved. Tom's article "A Preview of the New Gather" is not searchable using "Preview of the New Gather"...Also, the search function in 'find people" is case sensitive, which it shouldn't be.
Recommended Articles within the past few weeks commonly highlighted recent as well as older articles. I know this for a fact, because several times I saw an article in both the RA and Recent Articles section.
I'm one of quite a number of people who miss the left margin, for its functionality.
About 600 articles have been published since midnight, by the way.
But the problem must have been fixed.
The page would come up and not load.
I do not work for Gather.