Ya know... I could get our coverage done a lot quicker if I won one of THESE

http://www.rotorooter.com/john/index.php

Could you post some news with minimal pictures and add more pictrues later?

I've got one of those. Doesn't help.

Jeff

Seriously, we're not holding out on you for fun. The quickest we can get to it is the quickest it will go up.

We are formatting things behind the scenes while dealing with our real lives after being gone for a week.

Why not ask Adrian to label his 8000 pictures for a change?

J.

Mike
()

Sorry, I was just trying to help. (No idea who Adrian is.)

Take yer time, guys...who cares when the stuff gets up?

You scooped the best figure at the show, so everything else coming along is just gravy.

Peace,

Chip

>>Sorry, I was just trying to help. (No idea who Adrian is.)<<

Adrian is Adrian Faulkner of action-figure.com. He lives in jolly ol' England and is a heck of a nice guy.

He has a cool site, but his event coverage leaves a little to be desired. He'll post literally thousands and thousands of pictures, but he never labels anything. Good luck trying to figure out what it is you're looking at if you're not already familiar with it.

And that's the problem with the toy news websites when they're covering events like SDCC and Toy Fair. In their zeal to be the first to get their pictures online, they do it half-assed. That's why I like sites like AFI and RTM. They take their time and do it right.

Mike
(Dan and Jason: No rush, guys. Take all the time you need.)

How do you know about this? Do you have a habit of going to Roto-Routers website often?

Is the Otter trash talkin' me again

Actually I thought I'd respond to this as the folks here are mature and sensible and we won't get into a fight.

I maintain that it's impossible to cover ToyFair. Even in a quiet year like this year there's far too much product.

I went the gallery route (after a couple of years of holding back) simply because that's what our readers wanted and most product is now labelled. We do organise everything into folders dependent on company and line and we do try and follow everything up with an article in the news linked through (I have been known to still be posting coverage in June), but like you guys this takes time. plus we can't have 15 Spider-Man articles in one day so we try and split it up and mix it up so there's something for everyone each day. Sometimes it's split up too much, sometimes not enough.

A lot of sites tried to go for volume this year (not understanding why it is that we take as many photos as we do - they think it's based on traffic but forget we charge our advertisers by the month not by number of impressions), but Paul and I decided we weren't going to try and race with Figures and TNI this year. Hence why we got all the images up and the write ups are now coming. We're not Action Online and don't have 7 extra people we can lock in hotel rooms churning out articles. Heck we don't have as many people as AFI.

I doubt that they'll ever be a ToyFair coverage that everyone agrees is universally perfect so all we can do is do the best we can. Everyone's gonna have a different opinion on whose coverage is best and no one coverage will ever be perfect, so it's not worth stressing over.

I'd rather you guys take your time to do your coverage your way than just try to copy someone else, so I'll look forward to your coverage when it comes

I'm building a robot that can take pictures, record info and not sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, have pleasant social interactions that take away from time that could be spent writing about toys and upload to the site on the fly.

When it's completed, there WILL be perfect Toy Fair coverage. You'll see.

Silly Adrian!

(Oh, and welcome to the AFI forums, Adrian)

Jeff

whoa you trash-talked Adrian into coming on here! Nice!

Who ratted Otter out? How did Adrian know?

BTW, Hi Adrian! Long time!

Peace,

Chip

I once had a serious discussion with Ken Lilly (I think) on whether 5 years down the line it would be possible to wear a WiFi headset that did live streaming.

We're getting there as well. We posted Hasbro SDCC Coverage direct from their actual booth this year and Nomad is supposed to be uploading NYCC coverage from the floor today as well. (Looks like TNI is doing that as well, but our pictures will be better!)



I'm everywhere! EVERYYYYWHEREE!

Ha!

Seriously, though, isn't AFI everyone's first stop of the day?

Actually, I was just sick, cranky, and tired of the complaining about everything Toy Fair this year when I wrote that. Adrian just pops into my head first when thinking of other toy sites, but really it should have been Jay at TNI. Adrian and Paul do always have nice write-ups and information with their coverage, which pretty much no other sites do for every company.

But I think AFI is the last gasp of sites that label every pic now. Labeling (and hand-formatting the galleries so everything is grouped by line) takes *forever*. It is really a pain in the ass, but one Daniel and I feel is worthwhile. The big tradeoff is not getting stuff up immediately. I spent a huge amount of time testing and formatting a special toy fair blog just so we could give the readers something while we were covering the con and making the galleries (along with Vader's invaluable assistance in making all of AFI much more efficient). So even the non-abusive pestering about "even a little bit" of new coverage really is not what I want to hear right after spending 4 hours watermarking, compressing, formatting, and labeling hundreds of pictures.

But this might be the last time we do this kind of effort. Maybe one last gasp at SDCC, but I don't know. I was at toy fair as both AFI and as representative of my company, and trying to do both just wrecked me. I think age and time has caught up and made it nearly impossible to give the effort needed to do this right. So next year we might just be automated and dump all our pics into a gallery program that puts them up willy-nilly.

Adrian and I actually had a nice discussion about all this at toy fair, and we agreed that being "first" is an impossibility these days. To be honest, I'm impressed that he and Paul get as many pics as they do up so fast. Being a two-man team doing this is just too hard. Daniel and I also can't do much from the show itself since both of us do a lot of "off site" meetings to get you guys the info you crave. Peter, Jeff, Dare, JJJason, and Ryan really stepped up and kept the stream of news going, but for SDCC maybe we'll try to coordinate it a bit better for more of a constant feed.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Oh yeah, a few galleries will be up tonight! And more this weekend!

And welcome to the forums, Adrian! Whee!

J.