Building CheEmpires and Education

Castle Cher Castle
I had horrendous pop-up issues with this site all three times I tried to get get on (from two different computers even). Many links are broken – it’s possible this is a ghost town of Cherness. The graphics are worth a looksee…that cute winking photo…but I couldn’t bring up the forum or the chat. The biography was scrolling text too fast for me to read. Most annoyingly, I couldn’t resize the window to get to all the menu items.

…not to be confused with Cher Palace which is now a Yahoo! Group of 800 some people.

Army_2To support a palace or a castle, you need an Army of Cher is a fan database, basically another brand of social site, a place to chat with other fans and create fan profiles. There’s a small amount of multimedia here and the design is the least Cher-sparkly of any I’ve seen for a while. Interestingly conservative. It’s unusual. It intrigues me. I wish I could join all the social hubs of Cher out there. I really do.

UniversityCher University!
Oooh…Cher Scholar loves school! Cher Scholar wants to go back to school. There’s a page of firsts and a list of facts, and active forum, an album database and 102 members in the Yahoo! Group section. It’s a good start but I need more stuff – a syllabus, more homework, more tests! I did love playing with the bubbles.

Cher Web Sites in 1997

This all reminds me of the year of 1997 when I was at Sarah Lawrence studying poetry. My fiction writer Julie had to leave for a semester and she asked me to go into the college computer lab (a place I had never been before and thought must be filled with computer geeks) and send her school news via her email account. It was scary. What if I couldn’t figure it out? What if I broke something?. Julie emailed about web surfing and starting up an online opinion magazine (this became Ape Culture in 1998). I had no idea what web surfing was. I went to the Yahoo! site she pointed me to and typed in "Cher" for lack of any other ideas. And that’s how I learned how to use the world wide web. (It’s also how I learned to use those green periodical books at the library). At the time, there were only two sites about Cher, something vaguely official looking with Cher informercial pages and a great site from the UK called Cher Dedication. It had scrumptious essays, invaluable postings about Cher appearances (this was around the time of the "First Time" book tour) and the first web postings of "Believe" clips. I remember thinking "eh, not too catchy."

Later that year after I got my first computer, a Micron.  I spent a whole day surfing through every site on the web that mentioned Cher. Isn’t that mind-blowing? In 1997 I managed to find all Cher references on the freakin’ Internet! One-hundred monkeys couldn’t do that today.