I covered some of the things that have worked while being at AOL these nearly 7 months now; there have been a few things that have not worked.
1. GameDaily Nation. When I was first on brought on, I was to be a part of both Video Games and Online games. I did that well. I updated what needed to be updated and got some traffic to features that were a part of AOL video games and AOL games. However, in November AOL video games and GameDaily merged. In the merger, the old AOL games, GameTalk page was killed. With it, the daily work that I did. Not only that, my point of reporting changed too. I went from being a part of AOL games and video games, to being just a part of AOL games. Needless to say this was a bit of shock to the system. I had been blogging for the Gamedailyxl and working on plans for Gamedaily Nation. All that was ended with one swoop of the pen. Pretty bizarre.
Since January all my involvement in the video game side has been relegated to making polls and the occasional quiz. Gamedaily Nation? Well, it sits on the shelf waiting for another day.
2. Pushing innovation with regards to community. I came to AOL from sportingnews.com. At sportingnews.com we were total underdogs on the web. When you are competing with the likes of ESPN, Sportsline and the league sites (MLB, NBA, NFL) you need to be creative. What we did was create the first online sports community site. We had blogs, message boards, we made the focus of the site the normal sports fan. Think about it? You can get sports information anywhere, but what is going to make you stay at a site? PEOPLE. Anyway, I wanted to bring the same sort of idea to AOL. I wrote all of it down and past it out. Unfortunately, there just wasn't a lot of traction. Granted I didn't go crazy and really hammer the point home, I just thought it was the right thing to do. As we all know, community driven sites are all the rage as everyone and their mother tries to be the myspace of <name-the-genre> I was a little dishearting and I hope to get some of the things I wanted to see on the AOL games site one day.
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