User blog:Hatebunny/Paul Levitz on databases

I was reading an interview on CBR with Paul Levitz, and thought that this quote was pretty relevant to us as a database:


 * "CBR: What's your take on the evolving press industry that's sprung up around comics, where you have fan blogs and sites like CBR reporting on the industry and medium, as well as mainstream newspapers and magazines like USA Today having their own comics beat?


 * Levitz: Some of it is awesome! When I was starting out as a comics fan, one of the things I was passionate about was indexing. I worked on Jerry Bail's first "Who's Who Of American Comics," trying to identify credits for early comic books writer and artists whose work was unsigned and unidentified. Now you have, whether it's Comics.org, Grand Comics Database, you've got Mike's Amazing World, so many searchable sites providing so much data so readily available. In the old technological world, we were hand-assembling bit by bit and trying to put a fact together here or there that maybe we managed to put together in a Xerox or mimeograph form that maybe somebody could take a look at if they physically got a hold of a copy. Now, there's giant, wonderful searchable databases. So at one end you've got that, and at the other end, like Comic Book Resources, you've got the interactivity..."

Of course we're not mentioned at all, but we do the same things. We do it better than most, and we do a LOT of it. Still, when it comes to websites like ComicVine, we do fall behind in traffic, despite their dramatically inferior database pages.

That last sentence of Paul Levitz' quote, though, just reminded me of what I've been saying for a while now: We need to offer more content, beyond the databases. We need videos, reviews, interviews, and news. I know that people who work at DC must know about us and use our database (though, very few have ever let us know about it outright). I dream of a DC Database where creators interact with us on some level, at least, and where visitors come to get supplemental content, besides history, biographies, and the latest issue details.