Weekend BrunchGood morning, Zoners! And welcome to the first official No Fact Zone Weekend Brunch. Grab your Mimosa and your Eggs Benedict and your fruit salad (with lots of honeydew), and settle in so that we can get all caught up for the week.

First of all, this new feature is actually going to be replacing the Friday Free-For-All. With my new schedule, it’s going to be hard to fit in a good post late Thursday or early Friday, but I’ve always enjoyed our once-weekly chance to get to catch up with each other on both site news as well as things that are going on in our personal lives. I seem to be free most Saturday or Sunday mornings, however, or at least early afternoons, hence the birth of our new Weekend Brunch posts. These posts will be very much like Brunch – I’ll post when I wake up and am working on having a leisurely morning on the weekends, and it will give the Zoners an opportunity to relax and just talk for a while. Plus they’re always good with a Bloody Mary.

Click through to hear our latest State of the Union, and learn about all of the new features that we’ll be bringing you very soon here at No Fact Zone.

First, a little history lesson and a layout of the direction I’d like to take No Fact Zone. When I started this site, there was very little in the way of Colbert fandom on the web, and there was no community of fans anywhere that I could join to chat about the shows and Stephen. ColbertNation.com had very little unique content, and there wasn’t even the Colboards. I did my best to provide all the news that I could find, and give Colbert fans a place to be able to express their fandom.

With the redesign of ColbertNation.com, the game plan totally changed. The fans now had full access to every show, every sketch, and the ColbertNation.com forums have become an excellent centralized location to talk about Stephen. So the question becomes this – what value does No Fact Zone add to the fandom?

It’s still my humble opinion that this is and will continue to be the best site on the net for news about Stephen Colbert and “The Colbert Report”. But we have something else that is much more valuable – we the fans have built a strong and welcoming community of Colbert enthusiasts. We have always been a Labor of Love here, with 100% fan-driven content, and a 100% volunteer staff of Completists – this autonomy allows us to feature our passion and enthusiasm in a truly unique way. Our community is our #1 asset, and we are going to focus on building and strengthening that community. To do this, we are going to be doing some shifting of duties and adding of features that will help bring back people day after day, and encourage them to participate in the comments and as contributors to the blog.

We’re going to be bringing some new Completists on staff to help with the blogging so that we continue to provide the best Colbert web site out there. The beauty of No Fact Zone is that it’s always been community-driven. The more help we have, the richer our content. And the more fun it is to participate. We had a Completist staff meeting last night to discuss some upcoming changes and new features for the site, so I thought I’d bring you all into some of the changes you will be seeing here at No Fact Zone.

Episode Guides

The nature of the Episode Guides is going to change a bit. The original idea behind the guides was to give a searchable page for all information about the shows. When we started doing the guides, the videos at ColbertNation.com were very difficult to watch and there was no embed feature. We were the only site keeping the records about the show with that kind of detail.

Before Jenny with a Y started her R.A.P.S. posts, MsInterpreted, Kinaesthesia, and I (as well as a few other helpers like Jennie and TheLakeEffect) worked very hard to keep up with the guides. However, with the start of the R.A.P.S. posts, we got a bit lax in our duties and got very behind on the traditional guides because the fans now had a spot to talk about the show, which was a huge part of the original mission of the guides.

With the new ColbertNation.com revamp, the extreme detail that we were transcribing is not as necessary since we now have easy access to all videos. And with the R.A.P.S. posts, we are able to get a good amount of quotes up on the site almost immediately after the show goes live. So we’re going to make a slight change to the way that we publish show information. Going forward, I am going to type a hybrid of the R.A.P.S. post and the older traditional Episode Guides. I’ll put some basic information about the show in the header, as well as quotes from the show. I’ll also continue to put in commentary about what I thought about the show in the body of the post, and of course we’ll continue the polls. I really like being able to contribute commentary to the site in that way, and I really think that it’s helped facilitate a larger amount of comments about each show. I’ll also make sure to link to that day’s videos as soon as they are available, so that we’ll have that resource. You’ll see the new format in action starting tomorrow night.

Fangirl Suit Report and Apopcalypse posts

Doing this new Guide format is great in the fact that it will be much easier to maintain each episode in the long run. However, there are unique elements of the old Guides that we don’t want to lose. Plus we also had recruited a whole slew of SCribes ready to help with the old guides, so we’re bringing them in now as full-fledged Completists to help fill a couple of these voids.

  • Fangirl Suit Report
    This will be a weekly feature discussing the wardrobe, costume, and possibly even props of Stephen during the week. This is for all you fangirls who love discussing the stripes of Stephen’s tie, the amount of gel in Stephen’s hair, and how adorable Stephen was in that pirate hat. VebalTypo will be contributing these posts each week, most probably on Friday or Saturday.

  • Four Horsemen of the Apopcalypse – Pop culture references in ‘The Colbert Report’
    One of the benefits of the old guides is that the Completists would hunt down those obscure Nordic god references, those translation of French phrases, and find the YouTube vids of those lyrics paraphrased in the intros. It helps to have those collections of references to explain some of the more obscure jokes. Wren will be posting a weekly wrap-up of some of the more obscure references each Friday, so we can relive some of those jokes and actually understand them the second time around.

Stephen T. Colbert Award for the Literary Excellence Book Club

One of the features that has been asked for on numerous occasions is an opportunity for the Zoners to have talks on a more intellectual level about the books or topics that were brought up on the show. At our meeting, Val and MsInterpreted suggested a Book Club of sorts for the Zoners to participate and discuss some of the more interesting books and media that were featured on the show.

This is how it would work: We’ll keep track of the guests and books that people find most interesting in the comments. A couple of weeks before a show break, we’ll have a poll containing a few of these books for everyone to vote on. Once we decide on a book we’d like to discuss, we’ll post the book in the sidebar and set a date for the discussion during the show break. We’ll post plenty of reminders, and make sure that everyone has a couple of weekends to discuss the books before we have our book club post.

We’ll do our best to find books that are already in paperback and super-cheap on Amazon, or that are available in libraries, so no one goes broke to participate. We’ll also offer things to discuss like movies that have been featured (like “Man On Wire”, for example), or possibly even newspaper articles, like Fareed Zakaria’s Newsweek articles that are available online.

Does this sound like something that any of you would like to participate in? Please let me know in the poll below, and leave comments about your thoughts on the club so that we can gauge an interest in the feature and start planning.

We’ve got more on our plate for discussion amongst the Completists, and we’ll tell you about each of these changes each week as they come up. We’re going to do our best to continue to make this the best Stephen Colbert fan site on the web. If you have any ideas of features you might like to see here at No Fact Zone, please feel free to leave them in the comments as well, and we’ll put them under consideration.

Also, as this is an off-topic post, feel free to talk about your week or any topic you’d like to share with the Zoners. I look forward to hearing from all of you!

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