No Hotline

This weekend is a publication date for the RV Builder's Hotline, but I won't be publishing this weekend. I've got nothing to pass along; no tips, no pictures, no newsletters, no articles. I haven't found enough to fill an issue and most everything I've found interesting this week I found through the daily glance at Van's Air Force and there's no need to aggregate RV-building material if the only place it's appearing these days is on VAF.

The Hotline doesn't compete with VAF nor did I intend to push out an edition just because I had to.

You know that ad where the guy is browsing the Internet and he comes to a screen that says "You have reached the end of the end of the Internet?" That's where we are with RV information.

Everything that could be said about RV building has been said; we're at the point where we're saying it again.

Most of the content on Planet RV now isn't really building information -- which is what the Hotline emphasizes. It's user-generated content; people's flying stories, people's photos, a few tips. And Doug does a great job of sifting through that content and plucking a few things out for VAF's front page. No need for me to repeat that process when user-generated content isn't spread throughout various sites anymore.

Many of the building sites are dormant or -- as in the case of rvproject.com -- gone. The mailing lists are moribund. The bulletin boards -- other than VAF -- are stagnant and mostly uninspiring.

What does this mean for the Hotline's future? We'll see. But for this week, anyway, there isn't a need for it.