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I have posted the results of the Chugchanga-L Members' Favorite Releases of 2009 poll. There were only 12 voters, but it's still a reasonable sample of what this particular group considers worthwhile music releases from last year. Previous years' results are online too.
Chugchanga-L is a private online forum for discussing independent(ish) music. It was founded by Rob Vaughn back in 1993 as an offshoot of the Grunge-L mailing list, which had started out talking about SubPop and SST but became overrun with somewhat inane posts (and flamewars) about Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains; Rob wanted a place for people to talk about indie-rock and other underground/experimental music in a more friendly and intelligent atmosphere, so he started Chugchanga-L, invited his friends, and asked them to invite their friends.
It was pretty successful, and became a vibrant community and a good place for discovering and discussing all sorts of obscure and interesting music throughout the '90s and '00s. Over the last few years, though, traffic slowed to a trickle, as people moved their discussions to weblogs and other forums, or just got older and less interested in chatting about music online. Last month, the current owners of Chugchanga-L announced that they were shutting it down at the end of May. Rob (who hadn't been on Chugchanga-L himself for years) put out a notice that he was going to re-start his own version; I would be happy to see it continue, but if that doesn't happen I would be fine with it passing on into history, too. I don't think private music discussion forums are no longer useful in general, but perhaps this particular one is. I also made a Facebook group for Chugchanga-L Alumni, although I don't plan to do anything with it other than keep it as a marker and a place for old friends to stay connected.
In December 1993, Jeff Breeze asked members for their top 10 lists of the year; Joshua Houk had run similar polls on Grunge-L in previous years. Patrick Barber ran a poll in 1994, and in 1995 I took it over and continued the tradition through 2003. By that time I was busy stressing out about my dissertation, and I flaked out on running the poll for a few years until resurrecting it last year as a Google App Engine app; the idea was to make the results easier to compile by having people enter their lists into the web app rather than just mailing them to me, and then use Musicbrainz to canonicalize the artist and release names rather than having to use Google and eyeball the entries for mistakes and inconsistencies, but I spent a whole lot more time writing the app than it would ever have taken to compile the results by hand. It was a good excuse to learn Python, though, so it wasn't totally pointless. (All the source code is available, too, in case anyone else wants to use it for a similar online poll or something.)
Chugchanga-L is a private online forum for discussing independent(ish) music. It was founded by Rob Vaughn back in 1993 as an offshoot of the Grunge-L mailing list, which had started out talking about SubPop and SST but became overrun with somewhat inane posts (and flamewars) about Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains; Rob wanted a place for people to talk about indie-rock and other underground/experimental music in a more friendly and intelligent atmosphere, so he started Chugchanga-L, invited his friends, and asked them to invite their friends.
It was pretty successful, and became a vibrant community and a good place for discovering and discussing all sorts of obscure and interesting music throughout the '90s and '00s. Over the last few years, though, traffic slowed to a trickle, as people moved their discussions to weblogs and other forums, or just got older and less interested in chatting about music online. Last month, the current owners of Chugchanga-L announced that they were shutting it down at the end of May. Rob (who hadn't been on Chugchanga-L himself for years) put out a notice that he was going to re-start his own version; I would be happy to see it continue, but if that doesn't happen I would be fine with it passing on into history, too. I don't think private music discussion forums are no longer useful in general, but perhaps this particular one is. I also made a Facebook group for Chugchanga-L Alumni, although I don't plan to do anything with it other than keep it as a marker and a place for old friends to stay connected.
In December 1993, Jeff Breeze asked members for their top 10 lists of the year; Joshua Houk had run similar polls on Grunge-L in previous years. Patrick Barber ran a poll in 1994, and in 1995 I took it over and continued the tradition through 2003. By that time I was busy stressing out about my dissertation, and I flaked out on running the poll for a few years until resurrecting it last year as a Google App Engine app; the idea was to make the results easier to compile by having people enter their lists into the web app rather than just mailing them to me, and then use Musicbrainz to canonicalize the artist and release names rather than having to use Google and eyeball the entries for mistakes and inconsistencies, but I spent a whole lot more time writing the app than it would ever have taken to compile the results by hand. It was a good excuse to learn Python, though, so it wasn't totally pointless. (All the source code is available, too, in case anyone else wants to use it for a similar online poll or something.)