Welcome to the new Stream!

Thanks for visiting SciFi Stream. You may have noticed a new look to the site this week, and there are a few other changes to go with it.

But first, a little background.  For the last few years this site has served two purposes: 1) to provide quick-reference episode guides to all my favorite science fiction and fantasy series, and 2) to aggregate top news headlines from some of my favorite genre news sites, including Airlock Alpha, Blastr (formerly SCI FI Wire), TrekMovie, and the Stargate site that I also run, GateWorld.  From time to time we’d also publish some original news items and interviews, but for the most part the headlines that came streaming onto the home page were links to other sites.

I’ve had so much fun covering the Stargate franchise over the past decade that I’ve always loved the idea of writing news, doing reviews, and cast and crew interviews for the many other shows that I love.  But since GateWorld keeps me plenty busy, and I also have a family and am working to finish a PhD thesis by 2012, that’s never been realistic. Great volunteer writers are harder to come by than you might think, and the site just doesn’t make enough to pay its bills and hire some freelancers.  So, I went with aggregated headlines, instead.

Starting this week, I’m reinventing what SciFi Stream is. The aggregated headlines are still there, but they’ve now been relegated to the sidebar.  You’ll also find them sorted by your favorite show, below the scroll on that show’s home page.  And you can subscribe to RSS feeds for those headlines, or just for the headlines from your favorite shows.  That’s the cool thing about aggregating news: we do the sorting for you, so you can subscribe to news updates for only the TV series you pick.

Now I may get into more original news coverage one day, after my degree is complete and I am gainfully employed somewhere and putting food in my children’s mouths.  But for now, SciFi Stream is turning into my own sci-fi blog.  That gives me the freedom to write as often or as little as time allows, and not to feel like I have to cover all the major genre news out there.  The aggregated headlines in the sidebar will take care of that.  It’ll also let me bust out of the format of detached news reporting, and be more personal and candid with my opinions — about the news of the day, about sci-fi shows I’m currently watching, etc.

All the episode guides you love will stay the same (understandably, that’s where most of our traffic goes), and continue to expand as I occasionally post some comments on new episodes. (I hope you’ll do the same.)

I hope you enjoy the new format for SciFi Stream, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride and post some comments to get some conversation going.