You may have noticed a new affiliate bar on the top of all of the pages here on Comics Bulletin, a call-out to something called Crossroads Alpha and several websites that you may not be familiar with. That’s because a group of friends and I decided to work together as an alliance of sites, Crossroads Alpha. The theory is to pool talent and knowledge, network websites, and work together in a way that complements each other.
We’d been discussing ways we could support each other for a while. Each of us had our own sites (comics, games, creativity and careers), and we were all also experienced in running websites. So the idea is to team up, share some of the things we've learned, build a coalition, and help people connect to useful material.
The notion that we've been kicking around for a while has been to share resources, help spur each others' page hits, and sometimes share content as well. We want to leverage some of the strengths of working together with like-minded websites to together create something that is stronger than its constituent parts while also maintaining the originality, focus and inventiveness of each separate site.
This alliance also allows each site to focus on its own specific area of strength. As you may have noticed, we're no longer including Games content on Comics Bulletin for a number of reasons. By entering into an association with IndieHaven, a website devoted to indie gaming, we're able to provide an easy link to some of the smartest coverage of Games related material on the web. By linking to MuseHack, we're able to provide a link to a great clearinghouse for material about turning your geekly hobbies into a career. And by linking to Seventh Sanctum, we're linking to one of the best story concept generation sites on the web.
More sites will be joining Crossroads Alpha soon. In fact, we also are very close to launching our new movie and TV site, to be called Psycho Drive-in, which will contain most of the material in those areas that had been running on CB. (We'll still be including some movie and TV material on CB that we love, including Don McGregor's column.) it will feature most of the same writers that you're used to seeing write about media and will be overseen by longtime Bulletineer Paul Brian McCoy
And this formal alliance is happening alongside a more informal frienship that has Comics Bulletin sharing content with other friends, including our pals at Fanboy Planet and GodHatesGeeks, which has been a lot of fun for each of the sites.
2014 should be an exciting year for Comics Bulletin and for Crossroads Alpha. We have big plans around presenting more video and livestreams, have been talking about bringing in podcasts again, and likely will be doing a major site redesign that we'd like to have completed before San Diego Comicon this year. Please bookmark us, subscribe to us on your RSS reader, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and/or Google+ and comment in our forums.
Thanks! Comics Bulletin wouldn't be a success without every one of our readers.
Jason Sacks, Publisher
