signing in || reading blogs || leaving comments || recent comments || writing reviews || voting in polls || viewing or downloading media || comment on these instructions
welcome to the New www.pcs.org!
PCS made the decision last spring to abandon the old “online brochure” website model, as attractive as it was, and replace it with something far more dynamic, interactive and yes, to use a buzz word, more “web 2.0.”
Rather than try to define that in words for you, here’s a fun video made by a professor at KSU (Michael Wesch) that describes what we mean by “web 2.0.” Once you’ve watched that, you’ll understand where we’re going with the following new features at pcs.org.
what’s in store?
Here are a few of the things you can do when you visit us on the web that you could never do before. What’s more, you still can’t do most of these things at most theater websites around the country. Just one more way PCS is changing the way theaters relate with their patrons and participate in their community.
• Sign in as a registered user…or not. Portland Center Stage respects your privacy, so we won’t require that you register and sign in to our site in order to have fun playing and learning there. If you want to get the most out of the social experience of interacting at the new pcs.org, however, you may find that you want to identify yourself in some way with your comments. To do this, go to the homepage and scroll down to the bottom of the page, looking for the word “Register” in the right hand column. Look in the same place to “Login” before leaving comments on subsequent visits. When registering, you are free to give yourself a pseudonym like “theaterman,” and although you must provide your email address to the site in order to register, it is not made public when you comment. You may, if you choose, set your comments to display a link to your website/blog. We just ask that you not abuse this opportunity as some pharmaceutical web-bots have attempted to do. We do filter out comments that are simply trying to maximize links to their site without contributing to the dialogue in a meaningful way, so, plots to leave “very interesting post, thanks” on a million websites with your link won’t work here.
• Read blog entries from Chris Coleman, Artistic Director, as well as from cast members and other staff members at Portland Center Stage. We’ve made it super easy to pull up all of Chris Coleman’s entries straight from the homepage by clicking on a button that says “Chris Coleman’s Blog” near the top of the page. If you find another author you like, you can pull up a summary of their blog posts by clicking on their author name near the top of the post you’ve already found by them. Also related to blogs, you’ll find a tag cloud that lists several different topics people have blogged about (the heading for our tag cloud reads “Blogs by Topic”). By clicking on a word in the tag cloud you’ll pull up all the blog entries that have included that particular word in their list of tags. The biggest words in the cloud are the ones most often used as tags/the ideas most often blogged about.
• Leave your own comments at the bottom of these blog entries. That’s right, your words can be left for the world to read on the “walls” of our website. We just ask that you be respectful and adhere to the following guidelines. Please leave comments that are relevant to the topic discussed, refrain from using obscenities that may offend others, try not to personally attack the author or anyone else and, as mentioned above, don’t make meaningless comments just to create a link to your commercial website (we personally filter about twenty of these each day, mostly for certain performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals). PCS feels strongly about not editing your comments, as long as they adhere to those guidelines, so c’mon, tell us what you think! You can do this anonymously if you like, but you may want to sign in as a user, so people can get to know your voice…if your comments are consistently useful, you may just get a reputation here! Many of the pages on the site that do not appear to be blogs will also allow your comments…like this one. If you have questions about how to use the site or suggestions for other instructions we should post, please leave them in the form of a comment below.
• Keep up to date on the most recent comments from other users, including PCS staff and the general public. Just underneath the tag cloud you’ll find a summary of the users who have left the most recent comments and an indication of which blog entry they have commented on. Click on these links to jump to those blog entries and the associated comments. If you’ve taken a fancy to a particular user’s manner of expression, this is a quick way to find their latest comment.
• Write your own reviews of the plays you see! The space for this is easy to find. From any page, just click on the name of the play you saw from the navigation bar on the far right. When you get to the page for that play, scroll down and start typing in your review. As with the blog comments, you can review a show as a registered user of the site, or anonymously. What a great way to test your chops as a theater critic. Who knows…you could even land a job out of this! As with the comments, if you want to be identified, be sure to “login” before typing your review.
• Vote in online polls about all sorts of things, some theater-related and some related to other things about the building, the shows or your experience at the Gerding Theater at the Armory. We are trying to keep twenty or more polls going. Some of them may be retired after a show closes, but some will be around for an entire season or more in order to solicit a larger sample size. You can also click on the “polls archive” link to get a summary of how people have voted in all the active online polls.
• View or download multimedia files from our accounts at Flickr, MySpace and Youtube. At the bottom of every page you’ll find links to our accounts at these sites. Feel free to download production photos, embed our promotional videos on your site or “friend up” with us at MySpace. The images at Flickr are great quality jpegs, suitable for any web or newsprint use. They also have captions stripped in, so as long as you don’t alter them, you don’t have to worry about actor and photographer credit…it’s taken care of. We usually find out about new links and comments about our site through our google-alerts, but please let us know if you have a blog or site where you’ll feature our content…we might want to add you to our links out as well. We don’t have memberships at ALL the hot social networking sites, but if there’s something you think we should be doing that we’re not…please let us know.
Some things don’t change so much
Of course, you can still learn about past or upcoming shows, purchase tickets, make a donation to the operating fund or the capital campaign, read past newsletters and press releases or find out how to contact us here by phone or email. We are making improvements in these areas as well, and the architecture of our new site makes that easier to do.
So jump in, the cyberspace is warm and inviting and we want the new pcs.org to include reflections of you.
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