January 5, 2009
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Xanga Home Page – Purists versus Populists
Recently there was a big push to remove or downgrade the Xanga Powered Sites (aka “Ish” Sites) pre-eminence on the xanga.com home page. A lot of people really liked this idea and much “Ish”-hate prevails within the Xanga community.
What we have here is a good old fashioned political impasse. It’s the old versus the new. Let’s call the people who want the “Ish” sites GONE the Xanga Purists. They want to see Xanga the way they’ve always known it. A website devoted to people who use general-purpose xanga blogs and not tainted by these “new” Xanga sites. Against them we have the Xanga Populists. These are people who came into the Xanga fold *from* the new Xanga Powered Sites or else don’t care all that much about whether Xanga remains pure and maybe see benefits of the new “ish” sites being integrated into the Xanga fold as a whole.
Xanga Purists are naturally going to be more vocal since they are the ones crusading for a change to the good old days of yore. The Populists however tend to be a lot less passionate about it. Honestly they don’t see what the big deal is. It’s all still Xanga to them. A Populist never really gave a second thought about the links to the “Ish” sites appearing in the middle of the Xanga home page like they used to, whereas for a Purist it is a terrible offense that needs to be wiped out.
Personally I’m more of a Xanga Populist. Even though I’ve only ever had a Xanga and I almost never visit the new “Ish” sites, their existence or pre-eminence never bothered me in the slightest. I think if they are good for increasing Xanga’s revenue then they are good for me too. And although the links to the “Ish” Sites on the front page of Xanga never really bothered me at all, I’m still glad they removed the central bar of links just because it looked kinda ugly to me. Still I certainly wouldn’t mind the “Ish” sites being prominently displayed on the Xanga home page right at the top even if that were the most effective placement. A “Purist” would likely think the very idea blasphemy. But I certainly don’t have some burning desire to see them removed altogether. I generally feel their current placement way down at the bottom of the page is rather ineffective since I didn’t even SEE them there until very recently when I happened to scroll down that far.
That’s a general problem with the Xanga Home Page altogether. It’s got too much content so a lot of it is so far down the page it isn’t particularly visible. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve missed Xanga Team updates because the “From The Xanga Team” section of the home page is so far down I have to know to look for it in order to see it.
The problem, is as I see it that the Xanga Home Page is serving two dual purposes. It’s trying to serve BOTH the purists and the populists. And that’s an inherent contradiction. It makes the page overly bloated with content.
The Gateway function of the Xanga Home Page serves the Xangan Populists. This includes links to the most recent and top entries from each of the “Ish” Sites, as well as links to the Top Xanga blog entries altogether. Also administrative features like the Search function and the Signup for Xanga Mobile and links to FAQs and other documentation serve as Gateway features too.
The Magazine/Community-like function of the Xanga Home Page serves the Xangan Purists. The Featured Content which are basically editorially chosen preferred Xanga entries, The Xanga Team updates, Featured Question and stuff like that are all Purist features. However, these features, in the minds of the Purists are being polluted by content from the “ish” sites. Featured Content no longer highlights works from Xangans but from all the other “Ish” sites making Xangan Purists feel that they don’t even have a place that centrally focuses on their content.
The solution then is clear. What is needed is a strict divide. The Xanga Home Page should be split. There are at least two ways to do this.
One is this make a new Xanga Community site. This would have a different domain and be linked to from Xanga.com. The Xanga Community site is the centralized site that people who have xanga accounts but not a particular “ish” site would congregate around. It would be a place where xangans go to get linked to the best xanga blogs out there and would be untainted by any kind of “ish” content.
The other way is to make xanga.com the Xanga Community site and create some new IP, to serve as the domain that serves as the main centralized page for the entire Xanga Powered family of content of which xanga.com is just one of many subsites. This IP would then be the public face of the Xanga company on a whole and wold be promoted as a blogging platform for creating blogging communities of which xanga.com was simply the first.
In either case the design of the Xanga Community site has a lot of flexibility. It could look fairly similar to the current Xanga.com homepage or it could look more like the “ish” site pages and be organized as a kind of community blog. But however you design it, conceptually it servers as a role parallel to the “ish” sites and independent of them just as the “ish” sites are more or less independent of one another. In contrast the other Xanga Gateway site would be just that, a gateway that fairly links to all the subsites without giving paritcular pre-eminence to any of them.
This way Purists and Populists both have their places to go and neither needs feel left out. This is, the only way I can conceive of of really serving both groups. Anything less will leave a constant power struggle between Purists and Populists over the direction of the one precious resource the xanga.com domain. And will likely result in a cluttered page with too much content as the Xanga Team tries to make both groups happy as once.
What do you think? Should the Xanga Home Page be split?
Comments (7)
I’m more of a populist….
after all, we can navigate through all the “ish” sites just like Xanga…and many people I know have garnered more viewers due to the “ish” sites.
Change is change…and most people don’t like it to begin with.
Very few people have signed up for the sister sites. Most of their traffic comes from regular Xanga users, and a lot of their featured posts are written by regular Xanga users. Those sites only came into existence recently, and seem to be more for the purpose of making money rather than attracting new visitors to Xanga. Since they get all their traffic from Xanga, the less exposure they get on Xanga, the less money they make, so if they were shipped off to a secondary page, it would defeat the purpose.
I don’t know what can be done, but I’m more of a purist, so I think something along the lines you talked about should be done…then again I hated the universial inbox until I got used to it, now I love it.
I’m a Purist, but I’m not fussed by the Ish sites. I just ignore most of what’s on the main page and go straight to my Universal Inbox (it took me a long time to start using that!). I don’t even know what Plugz are/is. I think that Xanga is becoming more and more complicated and messy, but I don’t know the solution. I just write, and occasionally look for likeminded people … There are too many ‘I’s in this comment!
I wish there was another way for Xanga to make money. Well there are other ways, they just haven’t thought of them yet.
In a way I don’t care, I never visit the ish sites.
in a way it’s like a sell out of Xanga as a brandname. The ish sites look like massproduced cotton candy, same template, different colors – soul less, gives the vibe that all the accounts on the ish site are souless too
if you go to an ish site from Xanga’s Home Page and aren’t logged in/don”t have an account on Xanga or ish-account — there are no links back to Xanga’s Home Page. I pointed that out to the Xanga team a month or two ago.
Yesterday John replied me when I mentioned it in a comment @ Jonahthan’s. John said that they are working on that. But hey — how can they NOT notice a thing like that?! What were they thinking when building the front pages of the ish site?
We’re not going to divide the site in two. But we may provide a
way for users to hide content that is featured on our other sites.
Hopefully steps like that will provide a nice middle ground.
@relaxolgy - I’m sorry we missed it. We focused at first on having total signin integration between Xanga accounts and our other sites. It was really hard technically so it took a lot of work. Now we’ll focus on things like this. I appreciate your highlighting it, and now we’ll try and fix it up.
It makes me sad to hear you say that parts of Xanga seem soulless. I work really hard to provide a personal touch to the site. The one thing someone could say to most crush me would be to call our site soulless.
I’m not sure which category I fall into. I realized one day with some self reflection that if there was an “ish” site I was really into, like one for gamers or one for performing artists, I would be all for it, so I can’t really say I’m not for them.
@john - that seems like it would work well, people could opt out of seeing them.