The Readers Speak
I recently put up a feedback form on the Ceolas home page to find out more about those
of you that use Ceolas. There were a few specific questions and some comments. I've
summarised some of those reponses below. Thanks to all who responded, knowing who you
are and what you want will help me improve Ceolas greatly.
Specific Questions
Of 430 people who replied to the questionaire.
- 50% had visited Ceolas before
- 85% were from North America. Of those
- 26% were Irish
- 8% were Scottish
- 14% were Irish-America
- 8% were Scottish-American
- 44% had no Scottish or Irish links
- Of those that gave Ceolas a rating
- 58% said 'excellent' (gee, thanks!)
- 39% said 'good'
- 2% said 'fair'
- .3% said 'poor'
- Only 13% of North American respondents read an Irish-American newspaper
regularly, while another 12% read one occasionally.
- However, 18% said that the idea of a directory of Irish interests in North
America would be 'great', 51% said it would be 'good' while 31% said it would be
just 'OK'.
General comments
The comments ranged widely, but a few matters came up several times. The most common
comment was to keep the music content strong and not to dilute it by being a general
Irish site. I can reply to that by saying that it is a friend of mine who will be the
main force behind IrishNet, so it should not distract seriously from my Ceolas effort.
Having said that, I am now finishing up a PhD and don't have much time for Ceolas to
begin with!
There were also a number of people looking for particular items which they hadn't
found, but were in fact present at Ceolas (oops!). To address that, I'll be compiling
a full index of material at Ceolas, which will be accessible from the home page.
The tunes were a big hit, with many respondents looking for more, and asking for indexing
of the tunes, and others looking for more songs. Over the next few months I hope to
work on some projects to convert a lot of common tunes to abc format, complete with
indexing, and will continue to link to all other sites with these files.
A few people asked for some kind of interactive forum for people to discuss the music.
Since this is already done by the Irtrad-L mailing list and rec.music.celtic, I don't
have any immediate plans for this, but I would like to set up an area for people to
post comments on the archive, particular musicians or albums etc. There's a lot else in
the pipeline, so don't expect much to happen on that front for a while.
Finally, there's plenty of room for more comments and a ton of room for help, so if
you have any ideas or suggestions, please get in touch!
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