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haha, the avatar sets itself to whatever the highlight image of your gallery is At the moment tho this is a manual process, ie i have to click a button every now and then to update them.

the gallery should be able to handle pngs just fine, altho it was over 2000 pixels huge, bad meg. But i'll look into it.

Q: How do i get the gallery to use the flv player to view flash video files? What would be really pimp is if you could upload any video and the server converts it to flv for you. But i'm not sure we could do this because it would cain the server, but who knows.

Ok everyone, i'm in need of some serious help.

I'm back in nz and i have broadband for a few weeks, so i wanna go hard out on the site while i have the chance to.

I feel like sphism has lost its direction, lost it's members, lost it's 'reason to be'.

The .com fiasco, followed by being offline for ages whilst i made the dvd, plus me not pushing things forward have all added to the lack of folks around here.

But i think a lot has changed since the times of the original spherculism site.

For example, a lot of the key players on sphism aren't spinning nearly so much any more.

And a lot of the discussions about crazy poi just don't seem to happen as much anywhere anymore, perhaps there's so much to play with at the moment that there's not so much room for innovation.

Or perhaps there's so much video online now with google and youtube etc that there's less need to talk.

Or maybe people just meet up a lot more now than they used to.

Who knows.

I'm amazed that no one has uploaded videos to the site yet, other than me. I mean you have a huge, free server with a badass gallery that's all geared towards video delivery, and yet no one uses it. I don't get it.

What do poiple want out of the site?

I think the new era in spinning is to take all the info that's out there and condense it down into useful, manageable, bite sized chunks. I mean there's so much info out there on every conceivable aspect of spinning poi (staff, diabolo, etc) but it would take many lifetimes to find it, read it and learn how to do it.

I see spherculism as a means to condense this knowledge down and display it in a way that people can understand.

But i'm totally overwhelmed by that at the moment. Just trying to build the structure of how i teach poi is hard enough. Let alone make all the videos, then write about them all and make images to demonstrate ideas. Then there's the issue of linking to other information on the site, or other sites. Linking to other videos and forums.

Then there's all the other toys to play with, and all the cross overs from poi to diabolo to staff etc etc.

I guess spherculism is going thru a bit of an identity crisis. What's her purpose? is the effort i put in actually worth it? Is everything i do covered by other sites already?

What is spherculism's USP, Unique Selling Point?

There's also the plan to earn money from spherculism in a way that benefits everybody. I love the idea that everyone puts in £5 a month, then everyone makes lessons on anything they want to and are paid depending on how much of their stuff is downloaded.

But maybe i should just take sphism down the standard road to make money. Have a shop, sell some cheap tailpoi, blah blah blah.

I feel like i'm pretty much on my own, whereas there used to be so many moderaters around to help out.

I dunno where sphism is going, i dunno where it should go, free (and rarely updated) or commercial (and full of content). Can there be a happy medium perhaps. Maybe offer all the lessons (text) for free, but charge say 10c for a video that goes with the lesson.

Your input will be very helpful to me. There's just so much potential for this place but i feel like i'm swimming in treacle.