Subject:
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Re: Revitalizing or Replacing BrickShelf In Some Form
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:59:59 GMT
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Highlighted:
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(details)
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2941 times
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In lugnet.announce, Clifton D. Chambers wrote:
>
> The rights to BrickShelf expire in August. Is it feasible that we as a
> community can revitalize BrickShelf in some form as a paid site and say move it
> to North Star Computer Systems, since the president, Eric Smith, has offered his
> services? Has anyone actually communicated with Kevin? The other sites have
> been around and by their own admission generate less than 20 % of the volume
> generated by BrickShelf. BrickShelf was unique and it was dedicated to LEGO and
> the LEGO community.
For the record, I am hosting some LEGO club sites in exchange for links back to
the main Northstar page. I also host a number of LEGO-related sites (including
bricklink.com) on a paid basis.
brickshelf.com requires massive resources that cannot possibly be hosted for
free. BS states that it is hosting 1,891,345 images. Assuming an average size of
500 Kb, that's over 900 Gb of images, and that's a conservative estimate. The
number of image views is a big question, but the last I knew was around 10-15
Mbps/day.
I am considering offering a paid version of brickshelf.com that I would host as
an alternative to the generic flickr/photobucket sites. There have been several
other sites popup (mocpages, mocshow) in the past day that are also talking
about subscription services, but I don't know anything about them at this time.
I believe that Northstar is in a good position to host a brickshelf 2.0 site,
but I need to gauge how many people would be willing to pay for a service like
this, based on their disk usage and bandwidth usage.
Before I get accused of being greedy, I am trying to create a viable and
sustainable business model that hopefully can last a long time. Giving away
bandwidth and disk space is not a sustainable business model. A
subscription-based service is the easiest to manage and sustain, since the users
of the site are paying to grow the capabilities (bandwidth, storage, etc.).
There are lots of cheap alternatives to what I'll probably be offering, and I'm
sure I'll get the usual people suggesting that it should be free, but there are
some economic realities that simply won't go away.
Eric Smith
President, Northstar Computer Systems
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Revitalizing or Replacing BrickShelf In Some Form
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| This is what I had hoped for, especially if the old links could be preserved. I'd love to see a tiered version of Brickshelf to make it sustainable. God Bless, Nathan BTW re your other recent post, I have no online presence requirement at the moment (...) (17 years ago, 18-Jul-07, to lugnet.general)
| | | Re: Revitalizing or Replacing BrickShelf In Some Form
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| It looks like the situation could be getting complicated...there are all sorts of things happening. None, to me, look like Brickshelf successors. Eric's frankness as to the economic feasability is sound, however, the irony is this: if you charge for (...) (17 years ago, 18-Jul-07, to lugnet.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Revitalizing or Replacing BrickShelf In Some Form
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| I have noticed on LUGNET that there are a number of sites that are being offered as alternatives to BrickShelf. My concern is the issue of the number of sites now competing to fill the void and splintering the community, rather than one major site (...) (17 years ago, 17-Jul-07, to lugnet.announce)
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