Hercules and Xena |
Create Your Own Little Corner Of Fandom | Hercules and Xena essays |
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Hercules and Xena |
Create Your Own Little Corner Of Fandom | Hercules and Xena essays |
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Create Your Own Little Corner Of Fandom
Online fandom is many things to many people. Overall it's a collection of people who have come together to express their appreciation of...well, whatever they are fans of. Hercules and Xena fans come in all shapes and sizes, so to speak, and some of us have been involved in other areas of fandom prior to joining the HercXenaverse. Traditional fandom started in the 1920s and 1930s when readers of the pulp fiction magazines began corresponding with one another and eventually getting together. The earliest SF conventions and newsletters date to the 1930s and 1940s. The reader mail columns in magazines like AMAZING STORIES and WEIRD TALES carried the first "public" fan discussions (and disagreements). Back then, you had to wait months to get a reply from someone if you were lucky enough to see one of your letters published. To get the trite business out of the way, the Internet has changed all that. Sure, the print media still carry letters from readers, but now we have far more opportunities to converge en masse and discuss our thoughts (or share our disagreements) without ever seeing the people we want to read our opinions. Now we have email, the news groups, chat rooms, and message boards. Online fandom has spread its wings and is soaring free. Time was a person would sign on to a local BBS or maybe a national service like Compuserve or Delphi and find that someone had set up an SF discussion area (or several). There would be fans, exchanging news and information fast and fuirously. Each year, little by little, the discussion areas grew busier, and someone would create a few more. It looked like a great humongous process. But then the World Wide Web started catching on. As more and programmers started making free scripts available to Webmasters, people realized that they were no longer dependent on the whims of listservs, newsmasters, and mysterious people in the background of large online service bureaus. We can create our own discussion areas. Boy, howdy, can we create them. You can spend a weekend browsing the Hercules and Xena discussion lists, forums, groups, chat rooms, and channels and still not find (let alone visit) them all. It's tough to manage the information on where all these resources are, too, because people create them without really learning how to promote them. i.e., it takes them a while to find the large directories like Xena Online Resources and Hercules Ultimate Guide. We do our best to find new people, but more and more we have to rely on new people to find us. There are more than a dozen news groups devoted to Hercules, Xena, and/or related topics (including groups devoted to Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi, Hudson Leick, and Renee O'Connor). Some of these groups are only partly associated with HercXena fandom. Bruce is a star in his own right and is well-known for his work in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies as well as the short-lived series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (and, yes, there is a Brisco County news group). All of these news groups were created in the alt.* hierarchy, which stands for Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists. It's easy to create an alt.* group but not so easy to get systems to pick it up. An alternative that has been considered on occasion is creating a news group (or perhaps several at once) under rec.*. This would be in the Big Eight hierarchy, or what is more properly called Usenet (which is not the same thing as all news groups). Unfortunately, it takes a long time to get a new group proposed, approved, and created under Big Eight rules. No one has yet seriously attempted to do this for Herc/Xena fandom. When Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess first started showing, Universal Television Entertainment put a little plug at the bottom of the screen during the end credits. "Log on to the internet...." They began advertising their Hercules and Xena Netforums. These were the first true online discussion forums for Hercules and Xena, and the first 100 people to post to the Netforums called themselves "The Originals". Universal could not contain all the fans on the Netforums. For whatever reasons, news groups were created. But some people dislike posting on the news groups -- for various reasons. So a couple of mailing lists were started. The mailing lists afford the fastest rate of exchange if they are unmoderated, but even the most sophisticated email clients may have trouble keeping all the threads sorted properly. Following discussions on a mailing list can become a bit confusing -- and considering that some people respond only to the digests, or go offline for a few days and then come back and "catch up", it gets a little hairy. But as the Netforums, news groups, and mailing lists took off, so did the IRC chat rooms, and it wasn't long before people started putting message boards and javachat scripts on their Web sites. Which brings me (finally) to the point of this column. It's getting tough to earn some notice among all the discussion rooms, fora, and channels. Having a message board on your Web site provides a dual function: it helps you build a community of loyal friends who will keep coming back to your site and it helps add new content to your site. Of course, not everyone can run a message board. Nor can everyone start their own mailing list. Enter the commercial services. With so many Webmaster wannabes running around the Net, someone realized there would be demand for message boards and mailing lists. Hey, why not provide them for free? Just let people sign up with the services and then run a few ads to pay for them. So now we have services like OneList (now Yahoo! Groups) and InsideTheWeb (service discontinued) levelling the playing ground. You don't have to pay expensive list setup fees or worry about too much traffic on the list or your Web account. Someone else take care of the hassles. That's all well and good, but with a new list, message board, or chat room springing up every week, how do you stand out from the crowd? That's still where the game shakes the players loose from the wannabes. You have to promote your site and its resources. That doesn't mean splattering announcemets all over the Net (some people do this, but it's an Art which should be learned). It means picking the right forum and letting people know what you've got. Now, suppose you've just set up your own message board. Is it another Xena or Hercules board? You've got your work cut out for you. But what if it's dedicated to Xena's faithful companion Argo? I haven't noticed too many Argo fans out there, but there are some. You might have found a niche. BE THE BOARD. Sounds corny, but you have to participate in your message board by starting and continuing in discussions. Give it time, too. People will have to come by and see what's hanging loose before they'll join in. If you're lucky, maybe 1 in 10 surfers will do more than read. So, if only 5 people post messages to your board, don't feel bad. That means 45 more are READING it. Wait until you have a few messages on the board before submitting the URL to search engines. They'll index the messages once you submit the site and that way your chances of being found in a casual search for something other than "Joe Cool's Argo Message Board" are increased. But don't be shy in other discussion fora. If an Argo thread starts up, join in and near the end of your message (or in your .sig) put a little "BTW, I have an Argo message board at...." Promoting a mailing list is a bit more difficult. Mailing lists are not indexed by search engines. You can still mention the Argo's Livery Stable List in all the usual places, but people who are just out searching the Web (or browsing news groups through Dejanews (now Google Groups) are not likely to find many leads. What you should do is create a Web site devoted to the mailing list. Put the list's charter there, instructions for subscribing and unsubscribing, and then, as discussions come and go, think about including some of the digests on the site. This way the search engines will index some of your messages. Also, there is a neat service called Mail-Archive.Com (original article had reference.com which is now a different service) which will archive your mailing list. If you sign up with them (the archiving service is free, so far as I can determine), they'll store and index the content of your discussions. People can thus find your mailing list through their archive. The bottom line is that you have to put some effort into getting the word out to other fans. But it's also important to think in terms of building a community of fellow fans. Fans like to congregate with people of similar interests and tastes. There is room for many different groups in the Herc/Xenaverse. But the more unique your resources are, the easier it will be for you to stand out from the crowd of newcomers. In the long run you'll find a few dozen good online friends who will help you promote your sites by telling other people about them. Be warm, welcoming, and stay above the riff-raff when you elect to run your own discussion forum. You don't necessarily have to moderate the forum (although you may wish to do so), but there will occasionally be visitors who come by to stir up trouble. I recently found an interesting board dedicated to a new actress in a popular series. She very early on posted a message the fans on the board and gave them a great thrill. Sadly, one or more people then decided it would be "cool" to impersonate the actress and they started posting fake messages. The board may well recover from the harm done by these disruptive messages, but the fans may have been cut off from their fave actress if she decides she doesn't need to get involved in that kind of nonsense. Well, this really only touches the surface. I can't say much about javachat or IRC, but if you'd like to know more about how to start your own message boards, check out The Message Board Directory (service has been discontinued). I started it to help promote message boards, but it also contains information on how to create them, either with scripts (and where to get the scripts) or through providers. |
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