h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

blast this teetotal existence that I lead

Good to see you Psyc

I'm still around, but I pop in every few days (occasionally weeks) now rather than every few hours. I got fed up with a lot of the negativity and politicking that surrounded stuff like the Stretcher and even to some extent the Aviators, and also a lot of the people who joined the site around the time I did had left. One day I just didn't see the point of being so heavily involved any more - I wasn't appreciated and it didn't do anything for me any more. I've recently submitted my first two PR entries for 18 months, but now I spend most of my online time either writing code for the Cavaliers site or studying science courses at the OU.

I was one of those lucky enough to go up to London to look at the redesign, and I love it. More important though was the realisation that h2g2 (or is it H2G2?) is in really good hands with Sam at the helm. He's very passionate about it and seems to be getting his voice heard at White City. I think he's acutely aware that the redesign is just the first stage and when we last spoke he had a number of other ideas for phase two. It's worth hanging around to see what happens next, I think.

The challenge for h2g2, I think, is where it can position itself uniquely and offer something different to draw people in. If you want to write, you can just go to Blogger or Wordpress and write about anything you like, customise your site all you like, link it with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, whatever, and embed your YouTube videos in it and get a lot more exposure than you would on h2g2. If you want to contribute to an online encyclopaedia - well, to any outsider, there's only one, isn't there? In terms of attracting new users, h2g2 doesn't really offer anything that other sites don't at the moment and I think we'll see a repositioning to encourage newbies as well.

Thanks for that, it's really encouraging to hear things like Sam's passion and looking forward. That kind of thing is all too often invisible.

Personally I think h2's greatest asset is the community. I know that the EG needs to be the core (for various reasons) but the strength that underlies that is the community. We *know* each other and there are a whole bunch of satisfactions that come from that that are different from contributing to wiki or having a blog.

Hoo keeps insisting that h2 is a social networking site. It's not, it's a community, there's a difference. Maybe I should post something about what the difference is.

In terms of the EG I still see h2g2 as a guide rather than an encyclopedia. Perhaps we could focus on that.


Psyc, I know what you mean about PR (I avoided the place for my first several years here precisely because of that), but I think that if there was more energy in the community in general then some of us would be spending time in PR and challenging the aggression. I'd also like to see the Writing Workshop concept re-established and better direction of newbies there. But we need bigger numbers to manage that.

"I got fed up with a lot of the negativity and politicking that surrounded stuff like the Stretcher"

That got nasty? What happened there?

I'll be interested to see what happens to the site after this redesign - especially if there is going to be some repositioning.

You need to ask what when wrong with all the egos we got here ?

I just wanted a bit of gossip. You know how it is.

What's the stretcher?

It was a writing competition in the post. Rich and Pin (was it Pin?) would judge entries, and Galaxy Babe would spectacularly miss the point.

"In terms of the EG I still see h2g2 as a guide rather than an encyclopedia."


has been dropped from the front page, so it looks like the Editors agree with us on that point.