A Note on Methods

While working on this project, I have looked at web pages, mailing lists, newsgroups, FTP sites, e-mail addresses, online chats, and anything else I could find about each band. I've made an effort to make the listing for each band as complete as possible, although some artists have so many web pages devoted to them that it is an extremely difficult task.

I did most of my research through web pages, since most other resources were listed on them. I would start on the WWW, and as I found listings for mailing lists, FTP sites, chat rooms, e-mail addresses, or anything else, I added them. I concentrated on one artist at a time, although in some cases I added related artists at the same time with links.

For the most part, I picked musicians I like, or at least have heard of. I originally didn't have a regular method for picking the bands, but as I went one evolved: I concentrated on the Ultimate Band List as a starting point. I went through their listings alphabetically, choosing bands that I like and a few that I have heard of and thought would be good to add. For time reasons, I skipped several bands that had so many listings that they would have taken a long time to do, however I plan on going back and doing those later on.

Web Pages

I concentrated most of my effort here. Starting from the Ultimate Band List page for each band, I followed the link to each listed site. On each page, I looked for signs of the band's involvement. I listed whether it was an official page, record company page, or fan page, and any mentioned any signs of direct or indirect artist involvement. After doing a few bands, I decided to also list a summary of what was on each site, since I figured it would be very useful information for anyone looking for specific things.

Since most pages have links pages to other, related sites, I went through each links page looking for other sites for that artist that I hadn't already been to. In general, people are very good at putting links to as many related pages as possible, and there were even some pages completely devoted to links, so by this method I really feel that I was able to find just about everything available.

I skipped any pages that weren't up anymore, or that I couldn't get to. (Unless I had a good reason to believe the page existed and my connection was just down temporarily.)

Mailing Lists

I found most of the mailing lists though web pages. There were some I was already on, and I joined several more once I decided to do this project. Some mailing lists are listed on the Ultimate Band List, but I tried to get the information from a web page to make sure the informartion was up to date. Several mailing lists have their own web pages, many with archives of the lists. I looked at a few of the archives, but I tried to actually get on as many as possible for long enough to get an idea of what was going on.

Reading the mailing lists was probably the most time consuming part of this project. Some of the mailing lists were very high traffic, and I still have tons of messages piled up on my hard drive that I haven't read yet. Therefore I understandably had to severely limit the number of mailing lists I joined. There are some that I've looked that that haven't been listed on this page yet, some because I haven't done the artist's page yet.

FTP Sites

I listed these whenever I found one listed on a web page.

Newsgroups

For the most part, these were listed on web pages for the artists. I did try to check my newsreader in a couple of cases if I thought there might be one that wasn't listed. Due to time constraints, I wasn't able to actually read the newsgroups themselves. It might be something to add in the future.

IRC and Other Online Chats

I added these whenever I found one listed on a web site or in a mailing list. There were several web-based chat rooms, and even some of the IRC chat rooms had their own web pages.

E-Mail

I tried to only list these if they were publicly available on a web page. I only listed addresses that were directly going to the artist, or that could get a message directly to the artist. Although I planned on e-mailing the artists, I only had time to try to contact a couple, and didn't receive any comments. I plan to contact more in the future.

"See Also:"

I added this because I figured it would be useful to anyone looking for a specific artist. Sometimes I tried to add the related artists at the same time, but in many cases I left them to add later.