The Biggest blog news ever!

From the early days of the OTR Buffet, I had big dreams about the blog.  Very big dreams.

Those big dreams have actually gotten larger as time has gone on.  The blog system (network, if you will) has expanded so fast that I find that I am sort of perplexed - not knowing what to do next.

Last night I sat down with pen and paper and said to myself, "Now - what do you really want to do with the blogs, Jimbo?"

It was a warm night.  I had some cold water, the air conditioner and fan on and I got to work.

First, I wrote down a list of all of my blogs.  This would of course include the OTR Buffet, Marxisms, OTR Advertising, Billboard's OTR Reviews, Unfishal Lum and Abner Dictionary, Dummy: Photos of Charlie McCarthy, Say Hello To... (Rare OTR Biographies), The Crazy World of Vic and Sade and the blog you are reading now, Silent Radio.

Believe it or not, that's a total of 9 blogs.

Then I made another list of blogs I would like to start in the near future (or in some cases, the blogs are already there but need to moved from the comfy confines of the OTR Buffet to their own home; this way, they will be much easier to organize and cross-reference.)  This would include OTR Casts and OTR Books,

Yesterday, I began working on the new blog, OTR Audio Interviews.

This morning, I began work on a few new blogs: OTR Magazines, Golden Age Newspapers, OTR Casts (new home), OTR Books (new home) - plus I decided last night to revive OTR People (Who's Who in Old-time Radio.)

First, let me explain about the new blogs and what they are for:

Golden Age Newspapers (aka Golden Age News or GAN) will be geared toward the OTR researcher but will be invaluable to all researchers.  However, the focus of the blog is to provide easy access to newspapers that cover the Golden Age of Radio, either in full or part ways.  Each paper will be rated, links provided, summaries of what you can find in the radio sections, etc.  If you research OTR or want to, want to find ads, photographs, news stories (although most of that stuff can already be found on the OTR Buffet), this will be the place you will want to begin.  I can imagine those who research WWII or sports would also benefit greatly from the site when it is finished.

Speaking of which, GAN should be completely finished in less than a week.  It's not a blog - it's just a set of links - but it will still be unlike anything on the internet.

OTR Magazines will be a set of links and complete Table of Contents to the OTR magazine PDF files at OTRR.org.  I will keep up with the magazines as they are added.  Although there is aleady a Magazine Index there, I find that it is very innaccurate and it's hard to follow.

I suggest that the new OTR magazine index I make will make things much, much easier to find.  It will be very similar to the indexing of the OTR Buffet - and you know how easy it is to find what you want there.

[As a side note, I will not be indexing the hobby newsletters at this time. - I should be done with (caught up with) the magazine site by September (or before) of this year.]

Billboard OTR Reviews has been dormant for months and since I now have a schedule of what and when to work on things, I have included the site to be put back into the fold.  I plan on finishing it - but I have no idea how long it will take, since I really haven't explored anything after 1947.  [Recall that for the years 1945 and 1946, Billboard did nothing in the review department except television reviews  -- this was the reason I quit in the first places; I simply got frustrated and confused.]

Brushing off the dust from OTR People won't be hard.  Even though it is a mammoth project and I have the other sites to occupy me, I am going to make space in my week (actually up to 20 hours a week) to work on it.   It will be unlike anything on the internet and I invite you to explore what is there now and imagine what a completed site would look like.

As I stated eariler, OTR Books and OTR Casts will be moved to a new, permanent home, where everything can be easily cross-referenced, so that you can fin what you need.

Over the course of the next few days, I will unveiling these sites and making them accessable to you and your use.

The schedule begins tommorow, July 1st.