Alright everyone, I'm sort of going through a period of rather deep soul-searching, among other things right now in my real life, so I'm not entirely focused on my blog at the moment. But, even so, I decided to write an article. I was sort of expecting an article from PF today, but we'll save that till Thursday since I don't have it yet:
The title of this article may seem like a joke, but when you think about it, it really isn't. AIO websites can get in competition with each other. But before I get into that, I'll provide some background.
For the first 10 years of its existence, AIO never saw any fans start AIO-dedicated websites. This is probably because AIO wasn't a major and popular enough radio drama for it to have many truly dedicated fans. Also, the Internet was relatively new, so not many AIO fans had any resources to start a website. Of course now we can hop on Blogger or Weebly and start a website in literally two minutes, but it wasn't easy back then.
Then, along came a 19-year old AIO fan named Nathan Hoobler. Yes, I just wrote an article about him. He started an AIO Fan Internet Revolution, and many other fans, such as Corey Vanderlaan and Jacob Isom started websites soon after him. Back in early 1999, it was just Nathan Hoobler who had an AIO fan site, so fans would go to his site and his site alone for reference, reviews, and news. Even The Official Site was never as good for news, reference, and reviews as AIOHQ, The Soda Fountain, and The Odyssey Scoop.
But, by 2001, fans had a choice. Would they just go to The Official Site? Would they be AIOHQ fans? Would they mainly stop by at The Soda Fountain? Or would they get the scoop at The Odyssey Scoop? Or would they go to all four? Yes, all four seems like the best and most logical option. But fans can't just keep checking each site all day. They have to pick one or two to go to a lot and simply check up on the others. But later, this competition grew even bigger, in the form of podcasts.
Chris and Sarah, like Nathan Hoobler, revolutionized the AIO fan community by creating a new medium for fans: The Odyssey Fan Podcast. Back in 2007, once again, Chris and Sarah had no podcast competition, with the possible exception of the Official Podcast. So if fans were looking for a AIO podcast, they would most likely go to UAIOP. But along came other podcasts following UAIOP: The Whit's End Podcast, The Ceiling Fan, and, probably my new personal favorite, The AIO Blogcast. Chris and Sarah's podcast, however, soon faded away, and other AIO fan podcasts rose to stardom, like The Ceiling Fan and TWEP, and now, BBP.
And now, we've come to the present. Now, there are so many AIO blogs, websites, and podcasts, it's difficult to know which ones to go to. So fans are starting to choose. I, personally, am choosing The Odyssey Scoop for Official News, Twists and Turns for Unofficial News, and I'm listening to The AIO Blogcast most, probably. That doesn't mean I will not go listen to TWEP occasionally out of loyalty to The AIO Blogcast, or check out what The Unofficial AIO Blog for news, it just means those are my most frequent. It also doesn't mean that I'm purposefully excluding other AIO websites when I get in the AIO world, I just don't have time to check every current AIO website. And finally, it also doesn't mean those websites are my all-time favorites.
But I'm not really addressing what I wanted to talk about in the first place. I'm afraid, as a webmaster of an AIO fan blog, I feel as if I'm in a friendly competition to get fan's attention with other AIO blogs slightly similar to mine, like Out of Control In Odyssey and The Unofficial AIO Blog. I don't mean to feel as if I'm in a competition, it just happens. Sometimes I subconsciously wonder which story people are reading more: Adventures in Connellsville or Jason and Mitch: Secret Agents, even though I realize later that that really doesn't matter. The purpose of AIC was to creatively write about Odyssey characters I want to return, not to make my website more popular. But still, I can't help wondering. I also wonder every time Out of Control In Odyssey comes out with a new, amazing article, if while people are reading that, they don't read the article I just put out. Once again, I don't want to wonder these things, it just happens.
As a blogger, I want to give my thoughts on AIO, but I also want to captivate fans. I do the best I can with this blog, and I decided to do something different, to do a daily post. One of the advantages of a daily blog is that people will come to expect a post from me each day, so they'll come to my blog and read my thoughts on Adventures in Odyssey. But, (this is sort of the flip side to a daily blog) if I happened to miss a few days of posting, people may not expect a post from me. When an Odyssey blog goes on hiatus, I don't visit it nearly as much, because I'm not expecting anything. So, in other words, frequent posters make more popular blogs.
But the content on the site itself matters too. I try to bring unique, fun things about Odyssey and the Odyssey community to JAAIOB, such as AIC and The U.S.S. Response. Odyssey websites that don't have unique content will be forgotten by fans.
So, in conclusion, competition among Odyssey websites cannot really be avoided, competition is a part of life and we can learn a lot from it. But as we saw in Top This! it can't get out of hand. So far, the competition among Odyssey websites has not gotten out of hand. But I enjoy friendly competition, even if I don't like thinking whether people are reading this post while they're over at The Odyssey Scoop.
Thanks for reading my random ramblings!
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