The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

I have suggested to Pop's that OP put together a Blog / Story of their first two years of their phenomenal success.

I have come and gone on other poetry sites but this one has held me since December 2008, just weeks after it was launched.

As members of OP, lets help them with this by asking questions for them to get started in writing this story.

I will start:

1 — Where did the idea of Original Poetry come from? Its conception?

2 — How did OP and FaceBook come to partner?

Your Post Will Be Deleted IF You Post Anything Other Than Questions To OP About Its History.

Last edited by dahlusion 10-14-2010 at 02:14:07 PM

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Yeah, Dahlusion ! I second the moot! My best hat off to you!.

My question? What inspired Papapaczski to launch the idea of an Original
Poetry site?

Last edited by cousinsoren 10-13-2010 at 04:43:22 PM

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RE: RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Last edited by cousinsoren 10-13-2010 at 08:55:41 PM

RE: RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Hey Everyone,

This is a terrific idea. People like to know the history of their community. Look at the attention Facebook gets. Movie and everything.

Keep the questions rollin', and I will work on getting them all answered and posted over the next few days.

-Papa Paczki

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

How does the contest work? Is it purely by user votes? Is there a group that screens the poems?

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

i think this is a fantastic idea... to give people inisight into our community from it humble beginnings...

the question i pose is...

how does original poetry sustain itself as far operating costs in regards to webspace...

and...

from the infancy stages how were poets attracted to the site

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

This is such a cool idea... thanks dah!

I'd like to know exactly how many administrators there are... I know that Papa is the big dog (at least that's how I understand it), but is there an army of others that work behind the scenes, now that the site has grown to this size?

How does the membership count today compare to what it was this time last year?

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Good idea. Question?

How many different poetry judging schemes has OP used during the two years?

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

HI everyone. I have been a member since April 2009. I personally liked the site then. I still like it now but with all things change comes. Now for a question....

Who was /were the first OP poets. I remember somewhere reading that poets such as StandingBear, WordSlinger, Castlemist (and I may be incorrect on these names), so clear this up papa, were on another poetry site and came to OP in its infancy and were the welcome wagon for new poets. Is that correct??? All I know is that JustStella was one of my first friends and she is a sweetie.
Also I was enamored with dalusion right from the get go with his winning poem about the Tumbler's Rust.
ginga

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

What year was the first year for OP? Is there a date of birth?

2) How many members were there in the first year, in the second year?

3) Who were the first -year members, List of names, please .....pen-name or actual names

We will need to have a radio or television poetry reading festival annually or biennially. I haven't the faintest idea, how this can be done. I leave that to the experts, among us.

How will OP be financed , in the future, if its population growth continues, even at its present rate?

Will it be possible and feasible to introduce radio / television original poetry reading into homes, by riding on the backs of advertisers?

Last edited by cousinsoren 10-15-2010 at 10:00:21 AM

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

The original OP Home page was …well… quite original and comforting with its feather pen/down home/ warm look.

What was the reason for changing its original look?

Last edited by dahlusion 10-14-2010 at 05:17:02 PM

RE: RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Can non poets come to the site to read the poetry?
How was idea formed for this site ?

RE: RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Last edited by WordSlinger 10-14-2010 at 07:26:59 PM

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

The site had some disgruntled members in the beginning, they left, I miss some of them. The contests are still confusing to most. The magazine, good idea. How have the poets who made the first book done on the split profit side of things. The book was nicely done. The site has grown greatly, how did that happen so fast? How can we help so many inactive poets become more for us and themselves? Great site, the best k

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RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

This is an amazing site, par none. OP is a virtual Poet’s Society of many of the best modern poets in the English speaking world. Besides being read by the Chinese world and perhaps a billion new readers I am wondering what are the future plans, directions and goals of OP? Love, peace and freedom, Olan.

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Like the rest of you I love OP! I have participated in other blog sites, but this one won my heart. I used to write poetry back in High School, in fact the yearbook called me the "Poet Laurette" of our school. But after serving in Vietnam I sort of lost touch with that part of me.

Then I got a spam email. I think it was from Wordslinger, I'm not sure and came here to check it out. John immediately befriended and encouraged me as, at the ripe old age of 60 I began to find my poetic legs again.

Now, OP is the center of my life. My OP friends are truly my best, most respected friends.... That's what OP means to me.

Now, as for the magazine... It's a lot of work. There are deadlines for designing each issue, getting the copy in, layout and editing, getting the whole thing up online. For a periodical publication, those schedules must be met every month come rain or shine.

A simpler undertaking might be..... A monthly live streaming audio reading by OP poets of some of their favorite pieces. It would be much simpler. The work is already written, and could be submitted in advance and organized, perhaps, by a handful of people. In fact, the readings might even be able to be pre-recorded.

There is nothing like hearing a poem from the mouth of it's author...

My two cents....

I love you all...

cookie

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

So... How does OP fit in with the other online poetry sites?

Well... It just so happens that I work for Alexa.com (a subsidiary of Amazon.com). What we offer is website metrics... So if you go to this page:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/originalpoetry.com#

At the bottom of the graph you can type the names of other poetry sites and compare their traffic against OP's traffic. I put these four competitors into those boxes - poetry.com, poets.org, poetrypoem.com and poetryfoundation.org. Then hit the "Compare" button.

Original Poetry ranks about 297,927 in the Alexa traffic rank. This is a straight up measure of how popular a website is. There are about 298 thousand websites on the internet that get more traffic than OP. So we aren't in the top ten like Google and Facebook, but by comparison, starbuckclassicalpoetry.com is ranked 5.5 million or so, and poetrymagazine.com is 1.5 million. So OP is way more popular than that.

The next thing you notice is that if you click on the "Reach" tab you get a graph of what percentage of all the users on the internet visit these sites in a month. Not surprisingly the average is only about .002% or so. But interestingly, OP is on the chart with the others. That's a good start.

Things get a lot more interesting when you click "Page Views". This is not a measure of the number of unique visitors like the "Reach" metric, but instead a measure of how many pages get viewed (in aggregate). Notice that OP is in the middle of the pack on that metric.

Now click the "Page Views per User". This is a great metric because it shows how interesting people find the site. How many pages do they go to. Until recently, OP was the top dog in this metric! We have been taking some heat in recent weeks from PoetryPoem.com. But we are still beating the others hands down.

We are also very strong in "Time on Site" (how long a visitor stays on your site) and in "Search %" or the number of people who came to OP from a search engine - in other words they were looking for us or sites like us.

So... For the new kid on the block we are doing pretty well, I think.

By the way. There is a link near the top that shows you all the other websites on the internet that link to OP. There are 29 of them. Click on that number to see who they are.

cookie

Last edited by gmcookie 10-14-2010 at 11:28:25 PM

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

John,

There is one more thing I should mention. OP's page load times are miserably slow. Search engines penalize for that. If a site is slow, the search engine demotes it in the search results as it wants it's customers to be happy with the quality of the search results. We get about half of our hits from search engines. In fact we get way more hits from Yahoo than Google.... Why is that? Because Google penalizes more heavily than Yahoo when sites are slow....

At Alexa, we get revenue from click through. When we have a performance problem (even for a couple hours) we can see an immediate hit in revenue numbers. They may not recover for days or weeks after the event. This is a result of the Google practice of penalizing folks for slow response times...

For example, the number one website on the internet is Google.com. It's average page load time is 1.6 seconds. Alexa is about the same. Facebook is 1.9 seconds. In order to scale up a website you have to be able to handle the traffic and maintain good page load times.

Just a heads up.

cookie

Last edited by gmcookie 10-14-2010 at 11:42:28 PM

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Hmm
that explains why the School of Poetry, and The Poets of Blood
can't be found, well the Fleet here at OP, will love that info.

ALSO we are losing to many members, I just got one, KTIrish
wants to leave, something needs to give here...

Last edited by WordSlinger 10-14-2010 at 11:40:24 PM

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Please remember Dahs Post and others, so we don't get off track, thank you all..
GMCookie, that is fascinating research, that helps a lot, thanks..[/b]

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

Here is a list of questions from all posts:

FROM DAH
1 — Where did the idea of Original Poetry come from? Its conception?

2 — How did OP and FaceBook come to partner?

3- What was the reason for changing its original look?


FROM OREN
1)
What inspired Papapaczski to launch the idea of an Original
Poetry site?

2) How many members were there in the first year, in the second year?

3) Who were the first -year members, List of names, please .....pen-name or actual names

4) How will OP be financed , in the future, if its population growth continues, even at its present rate?

5) Will it be possible and feasible to introduce radio / television original poetry reading into homes, by riding on the backs of advertisers?


FROM MOOT POINT?
How does the contest work? Is it purely by user votes? Is there a group that screens the poems?

FROM DANO
how does original poetry sustain itself as far operating costs in regards to webspace...

and...

from the infancy stages how were poets attracted to the site

FROM MINDNUMBING
how many administrators there are...
How does the membership count today compare to what it was this time last year?

FROM HAMPTON
How many different poetry judging schemes has OP used during the two years?

FROM GINGA
Who was /were the first OP poets. I remember somewhere reading that poets such as StandingBear, WordSlinger, Castlemist (and I may be incorrect on these names), so clear this up papa, were on another poetry site and came to OP in its infancy and were the welcome wagon for new poets. Is that correct???

FROM TEAR DROPS
Can non poets come to the site to read the poetry?
How was idea formed for this site ?

FROM KDARCY
How have the poets who made the first book done on the split profit side of things.
how did that happen so fast? How can we help so many inactive poets become more for us and themselves?

FROM OLAN 01
I am wondering what are the future plans, directions and goals of OP?

FROM GMCOOKIE
Papa has to answer those lol, cause they are something of news...

Last edited by WordSlinger 10-15-2010 at 12:24:22 AM

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

OK... Here are some questions, (from my little website techie brain).

What can be done to increase traffic to OP?

Would advertising and sponsored links bring in enough revenue to host the site on faster servers?

What kind of hit rate do other literary magazines get on this magcloud.com website? Will that help us with our rankings and revenue?

Last edited by gmcookie 10-15-2010 at 10:13:54 AM

RE: The History Of Original Poetry's First Two Years.

In response to dah's invitation to comment on this Forum thread, I just want to say how much I enjoy this site, have come to depend on it, intellectually, and where I hope it goes as it heads into its next two years.

I don't think it is perfect. Can any site be? I particularly dislike the Contest feature. I don't think Poetry should compete with itself. I know I stand in a small circle of others who might agree with me, but that's how I feel. I do like the idea that one has the choice to enter such or, like me, to defer.

I guess the single feature about OP that I simply value above all else is the ability it allows one (in thise case: me) to be one's self. Not only a matter of allowance, but the encouragement to be one's self. Add to that the fact that belonging to and participating in OP is 100% FREE. I hope there is never a fee charged for anything here.

I also like the idea OP provides a "workshop" attitude toward posting one's work. There have been unfortunate cases where intolerance ruled, but I realize anti-bullying is an area of genuine concern. But it's an awfully sensitive area, this guarding against abuse, and should be examined thoroughly before the door gets slammed against a member for his opinions. I do not envy those who have been put in a position of judging such. It's a necessary task I wouldn't want to be a part of.

Finally, I hope OP's continued growth is not impeded by threats of any single faction blotting out the rights of others. As one who believes in standards for all areas of artistic endeavor, I am encouraged when I see such promoted, allowing those who disagree to have their say as well.

I shall conclude by saying how very much I appreciate OP for the several friendships I have made here.

Long live OP!

Richard R. Salassi