Elvis fans are very active on the internet, there’s no doubt about that. The EPE/ Impersonator news and my opinion about that got close to a hundred reactions so far. The discussion boards are all very active too, being it FECC, the German one or others and there are many fan sites.
To pick one more recent example: Joe Pirzada’s Memphis Recording Service project has been discussed over and over again. The content of those discussions differed as usual from very factual to simple name calling. At the very moment ElvisNews.com gives the opportunity to ask Joe directly about the projects, only five questions popped up. Where are all those active fans?
Okay, another example for those that don’t get the point yet. ElvisPedia, the interactive encyclopedia project we started, based upon our databases. Only a handful of people jumped in immediately and probably lost their interest already because they saw they were the only ones. Fans love to show their knowledge. As one of the people behind this site I saw many emails with corrections, supplements and so on. So why does ElvisPedia not work (yet)?
In Holland we have a saying “The best steersmen are on land” and I guess everybody knows what it means. I can’t believe the Elvis community really works like this, seeing all the time that is put in fan sites, discussions and so on. There must be another reason. Is it the relative anonymity? A nick name on a discussion board is different from an email. Well, this goes for the questions for Joe Pirzada partly, but I think that everybody knows by now that ElvisNews doesn’t share email addresses, unless the user doesn’t bother. For the encyclopedia it doesn’t work that way at all, since everybody can decide themselves whatever name to use.
For once I have no opinion and I am only puzzled about “the why” behind this behavior. Is it the little “Scrooge” (the knowledge is mine!) in everybody regarding the encyclopedia? Is it the anonymity of the discussion boards? I really DO want to know...