I seem to get the feeling that this site unlike others in our town is not afraid to acknowledge that other websites that do basically the same things exist. It is my sinciere hope that this post will be allowed to remain, in the spirit of free speech, and because this post isn't breaking any news to anyone here that there are other websites, we all know that

However  It seems strange to me why a city under the size of 40,000 needs 4 seperate well established community websites, plus an official city website. While thinking about this issue, I developed several hypothesis about the present state of the battleground for pieces of The Colony online pie as well as the future viability of these websites. The Colony, for all of it's downfalls in terms of civil management is on the vurge of a population boom. When you combine that fact with the escalating competition in the realm of online community websites in The Colony a few things become obvious. This town ain't big enough for the 5 of us. However it is big enough for 3. The reason is because you can seperate the websites into three different categories.

Type I : Official City/Government Sites- These sites will always be here and will never encroach on aspects of the other two like message boards, original material, etc. etc.

Type 2: Community Websites: These sites are run by private citizens and basically provide the same services, messageboards, a feeling of community, classifieds, and callendars of events around the city. This will be the front line for the cyber battle. The whole point of these types of websites is to be a one stop shop, no one wants to have 3 different id's and passwords on 3 different webistes to find out the same information. Dualy, what good is a messageboard if it's only attracting 1/3 of it's target audience. What makes a message board great is the fact that it creates a vibrant online community,

Type 3: Satire/Entertainment Sites: This is obviously www.ilovethecolony.net, ilovethecolony.net will remain almost completly unaffected by the competition between the community websites. Why? because ilovethecolony.net serves a completly different purpose. hopefully no one will ever in their quest for local happenings in the colony go to ilovethecolony.net, and if they do, god help them. While there is quite a bit of overlap in readership between ilovethecolony.net and the other community sites, a community site will never take away visitors from iltc.net or vice versa as they serve two distinct needs, information and entertainment.

In a nutshell the websites of www.inthecolony.com, www.thecolony.com, and www.ilovethecolony.com all provide the same basic services. Which means, they are competing for the same static number of visitors. Because of this you see a few things happen, first, you get one dominant website, which is currently inthecolony, while the other subordinate website (ilovethecolony.com) flounders as it attempts to co-exist and survive on the scraps that fall from the table of the dominant power. However, recently the resurgance of www.thecolony.com has introduced a new dynamic, a website that does not seek to co-exist, but rather go head to head with the juggernaut and using new and previously unavailable features start chipping away at the dominant sites user base while at the same time become a more attractive option to new users who are not affiliated with either one. inthecolony.com and thecolony.com will be the two duking it out at the end, as no doubt, ilovethecolony.com will either fold completly or be content to exist on it's 50 hits a month that it is currently recieving. (We all know it's just a front for a real estate company out of florida anyway don't we?) As for the two contenders, only time will tell who will emerge victorious in that pursuit. Make no mistake, there is the possibility for substantial money to be made in this area from the aspect of ad space sold to local buisnesses.

It would probably be a safe assumption that the city of The Colony does not only posses a disproportinatly large number of websites dedicated to it, but also is more than likely the smallest if not the only city in the country with it's own satirical website. It will be very interesting to see how these sites evolve and co-exist in the coming years.