In the good ol’ days (five years ago), a site launch would’ve been a big splashy event with features to "present" and games to play and all of that. But this isn’t an old-school site. In this new era of blogs and citizen-journalists, we wanted to build organically, rolling out new features step by step, and collaboratively including your feedback and suggestions as we find our direction. Ultimately, we want to be the Slashdot of Richard Branson news, but how we get there and what this site ultimately becomes are up to you Richard Branson fans everywhere.  

Ideas already in the works: Member logins… a story submit page for news and appearance info (you can send email in the meantime)… discussion boards… enabling trackback… podcasts… even software that lets us pull Branson appearances off our Tivo. And that’s just the start. You probably have even more ideas, and we’d love to hear them.

Of course, the most basic question: Why build a site dedicated to Sir Richard Branson? I guess the answer is, why do people build sites for any celebrities? Branson fandom today is just the business-savvy edge of celebrity fandom; that is, I rave about Branson in the same way that others here in Los Angeles rave about Brad & Jen. It might not make sense to American audiences who don’t know much about him, but to readers elsewhere — especially in Europe, where he’s got rock star status — Branson’s certainly enough of a celebrity to warrant a site. Hopefully American audiences will catch on soon too with the premiere of The Rebel Billionaire next week!

But there’s another reason too. For entrepreneurs (or those aspiring to be), Branson is the best example that you can survive, have fun, and make a fortune doing business his way. He pioneered this new-millenium business philosophy thirty years ago, and only now are the rest of us catching on. Consider his life style in contrast to the more staid lifestyles of Trump and Bill Gates and the typical billionaire crowd— Which lifestyle would you most want to have? (Before the Apprentice propaganda, Trump used to cite "being able to make 600 phone calls a day" as his greatest strength.) Beyond the money, Branson has what so many entrepreneurs today want: Building an empire that lets you do things your way, lets you live life to its fullest, lets you do well and also do good, and still inspires you to "work" even after you’ve got more money than you could spend in a lifetime. That’s the greatest trick of all, so of course we’re in awe of the magician who made that happen.

If you’re wondering who’s behind this site, we’re just Branson fans like you, neither officially endorsed by Branson nor affiliated with Virgin Group. I’m John Stanforth, and the idea for this site was simply my own wish to find the latest Branson news. I heard about his Larry King Live appearance last year, and was really irritated that I’d missed it. So, having some experience with celebrity sites (I worked on sites for Paramount, Dreamworks, Carsey-Werner, and other entertainment companies, and even built the first official Meredith Brooks site back in 1997), I decided to build the site I wanted to read. The "we" also includes several friends who send me Branson news links, and my friend Shawn Johnson who designed the header image, and hopefully soon, other bransonblog.com readers who will also post links just like I do. If you’ve got something to post— links, book reviews, anything other Branson fans will enjoy— send us an email at editors @ this site name.

On the technology side, the RSS feed for the site will be especially important given the unpredictable frequency of news stories. In any given week, there may be dozens of stories about Branson (as in the next few weeks of Rebel Billionaire coverage), or it might be entirely quiet. Subscribing to the RSS feed in your favorite news aggregator will let you keep up with the site without having to visit us when there are no new posts. (That gets old fast.) So grab a free Bloglines account, and let your aggregator do the checking instead.

But enough rambling… enjoy the site, and let us know what you think. Thanks!