A WEEKLY SMASHING PUMPKINS EDITORIAL

As some of you may have noticed, Ground Zero has switched gears to become an editorial page. Click here to read what's going on and why I changed the site.

Welcome to the first week of Ground Zero! A new editorial concerning The Smashing Pumpkins or us (the fans) will appear on this page every week (usually on Monday.)

As do many fans, I hold a wide variety of opinions on my favorite band, The Smashing Pumpkins. This web site will be a weekly forum for the presentation of my views.

This Week's Edition

Why does vigorous web site competition exist among Smashing Pumpkins webmasters?

Ever since I took my love of The Smashing Pumpkins with me to the World Wide Web, two things soon became very apparent to me. The first was that there was a mind-boggling amount of Smashing Pumpkins sites on the Web. The more I looked, the more sites I found. The second came a little later, but hit me just as hard. Perhaps caused by the existence of so many Smashing Pumpkins sites, competition among the sites seemed to run quite rampant.

Now, an overgeneralization of this issue is unfair. Not all webmasters or websurfers of Smashing Pumpkins sites turn such sites into a competitive arena. The fact remains, though, that enough fans and webmasters do make these sites a competitive slugfest to make it a real problem.

But why is competition among these sites a problem? In theory, it isn't. Friendly competition among sites ultimately benefits all those concerned. Webmasters are motivated to make their sites better and better, and the fans visiting these sites benefit directly from these continued improvements. In practice, though, a problem forms when this friendly competition escalates into a fierce competition in which sites are directly attacked as inferior to others.

In many ways, this agressive sort of competition is a reflection of society in general. The strive to be the best is an idea that is continually practiced around us. Perhaps this leads some webmasters to form a monopolisitic attitude, and leads to the desire to have the overly dominant site that "everyone goes to."

This sort of fevered competition does not have a place in the online Smashing Pumpkins fan community. In my opinion, fan sites should exist to present valuable resources and information to fellow fans. A webmaster who repeatedly stares at his or her hit counter and tries to dream up ways of increasing traffic to the site is missing the point. The focus should be on the site's content and what that content provides the Pumpkins fan community, not how many thousands of hits a site gets per week.

We all have a common bond. We all enjoy the music of The Smashing Pumpkins. When site competition rises to a fever pitch, and name-calling and site-trashing become common place, we lose sight of this important bond. Smashing Pumpkins web sites shouldn't be a competition. 

That devalues us, the band, and the music.

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"Ground Zero" might seem like an unusual name for a Smashing Pumpkins editorial page, but I believe that ideas and opinions are not inherently good or bad. It's whtat you do with these ideas and opinions that's really important. Keep that in mind while you browse this site. The contents of Ground Zero and the files located under the "/2639" directory at the http://geocities.datacellar.net/SunsetStrip/Palladium/ site in no way reflect the opinions or views of GeoCities. GeoCities is not responsible for the contents of the aforementioned pages, nor is it liable for its contents.

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