Prepare for #WorldGothDay as the #InsideOutcast #Podcast traces #Goth #Music back to its roots http://t.co/uElVFSMqjf #GeekPlanetOnline
Interim Office, 6 Brooklands Road, Broadfield, Crawley, West Sussex, RH11 9QQ
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GeekPlanetOnline.com is an online community dedicated to the passion and fascination of fandom, covering not only traditional "genre" concepts like Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror but also more modern areas of geekery, like video gaming, comedy and movies. Whilst, of course, there is nothing new about Fandom (with that capital "F" dropping into place with an audible clang!)
Beginnings
GeekPlanetOnline.com started life as GeekPlanet.co.uk, a personal project for our Publisher Matt Dillon. Matt had just finished a two-year stint writing on a volunteer basis for a festival website, and had grown frustrated by the lack of focus given to the festival's online presence despite its growing number of visitors; Matt felt that the festival's fan community deserved a place to hang out and talk about their favourite things. Common belief held that the internet was already full of fan communities and so-called social groups, but research found that most of them were very niche, focusing on one topic, genre, series and so on, and that nearly all of them were insular. Perhaps most crucially, however, Matt found that the spirit behind them was almost universally mired in negativity; what sucked, what didn't live up to expectation, what it was and wasn't acceptable to like. What the internet needed, Matt felt, was a community which included anyone who wanted to join, which focused on the more positive aspects of fandom, in which geeks could talk about the things that they loved. The only problem was a lack of knowledge – Matt had the willingness to put something together, but no clue about how it might be done. This was about to change.
For the first seven months of 2008, Matt taught himself about Content Management Systems and how best to use them to build a website, launching GeekPlanet.co.uk on 31/07/2008 as a means not only to keep writing about the things he enjoyed, but also as a “test site” with which to try out the things that he had learned. The site attracted a handful of volunteers, including a cartoonist, and attracted its fair share of followers, but a personal site was really all it was until January 2009, when Matt meet an impressively bearded geek by the name of Chris Brosnahan.
Rebirth
Chris and Matt were members of the same internet forum, and had hit it off whilst chatting about The Dark Knight at a social event. Chris later approached Matt about helping to produce a Podcast idea he'd been developing and hosting it on GeekPlanet. The remainder of the evening was spent batting ideas back and forth; a process which continued, via text message and email, for most of the week. The result of this brainstorming, The Eclectic Podcast, debuted on GeekPlanet.co.uk in February of that year, and Chris was offered the job of Site Editor a short time later. With Chris on board, Matt realised that he finally had a shot at building the community he'd always wanted to make, and on his 29th Birthday, 29/03/2009, the site was relaunched as GeekPlanetOnline.com. Six months later, Podcaster Dave Probert was offered the position of Deputy Publisher (which he duly accepted!), adding another highly talented and motivated individual to the GeekPlanet management team, and the rest, as they say, is history.
GeekPlanetOnline now boasts no fewer than nine Podcasts, thanks to a successful partnership with several members of The Legion of Tangent, two webcomics, a busy forum, and a growing selection of regular contributors bringing a superb and professional level of written content to a community which enjoys not only reading it, but contributing content back to the site in return. As another new decade approaches, things can only get better – and it's all thanks to people like you.
Like what you hear? Then hurry over to our recruitment page and learn how you can join in!
