Pottermore website looks to lure lapsed Harry Potter fans back into the fold

Jaime Schilling

13 years ago

"Squee!" was my word for 2007. The ultimate fan girl sound, made all the
more appropriate by the fact that I picked it up from Pottercast, one of the
hour-plus long Harry Potter podcasts that I listened to immediately upon
release every week. Not only was a I
huge Harry Potter fan, I was a fan of the Harry Potter super-fans – those
leaders among geeks who founded the two most popular Harry Potter fan websites
out there, Melissa Anellli, webmistress and one of the early writers for The
Leaky Cauldron, and Emerson Spartz, founder of Mugglenet. "Squee"
just seemed to encompass all the nerdy-joyousness that a new Harry Potter
tidbit entailed.

I'll admit it now – nearly four years later – I was obsessed
with Harry Potter and the Harry Potter fandom.
My online "favorites" folder was a mile long, and almost all Harry
related. I'd check the fansites hourly,
especially as the release date for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)
drew
near. I'd spend days puzzling over any
new item on J.K. Rowling's highly interactive website, or coming up with more
and more intricate theories about what might happen in Book 7, and I'd feel
like one of the cool kids because I knew what all the Harry Potter community
inside jokes referred to.

And then – shortly after Harry Potter 7 was released, I
quit. Just like that. Cold turkey.
I suppose I could have kept up with the site for the Harry Potter movies or
theme park news, but it felt like a poor substitute for the continual
anticipation of "What's going to happen to Harry/Ron/Hermione next?"

That was – until last week.
JK Rowling's team sent the top ten Harry Potter fansites publicity
emails including geographic coordinates and the address of a website that uses
Google Maps to show a street-view of the entered location. Type in the coordinates from
the-leaky-cauldron.org for example, and you get a view of Salem Common, in
Salem, Massachusetts. Zoom in a little
closer, and a huge "E" shows up on the corner of North Washington Square and
Brown Street, with a little pop-up message informing the reader that "The Salem
Witches Institute visited the Quidditch World Cup."

Harry Potter and Pottermore
Publishing Rights copyright J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter
characters, names and
related indicia are trademarks of and copyright

Warners Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

Now my life has changed just a bit in the four years since I
last obsessed over Harry Potter. Due to
the recession my company is half-staffed compared to the quasi-economic boom
time of 2007. I've also gotten
promoted. And married. With a huge-ish high-energy golden retriever
named Remus, who is apt to eat drywall if left unexercised and unattended for
long periods of time.

And all this amounts to one striking conclusion: These days,
I don't have six hours a day to spend online looking for the latest &
greatest on Harry Potter. But last
Wednesday when the coordinates were released, I couldn't help myself. I spent my lunch hour traipsing from one site
to the next, looking up coordinates, finding letters, and combining them like
some epic word jumble to figure out what the heck it all meant.

J.K. Rowling smiles enigmatically
in front of the "Pottermore" logo. Harry Potter and
Pottermore Publishing
Rights copyright J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter characters,
names and related
indicia are trademarks of and copyright Warners
Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

Then real life set back in and Harry Potter had to be set
aside in favor of an afternoon of budget meetings and an evening of lord-knows-what-but-I'm-sure-it-was-important. By the time I emerged from adulthood, the
Potter community had discovered the word was "Pottermore" and the youtube
channel and @Pottermore account had been revealed. Even CNN got ahold of the story.

In the week since then, I've broken my ban on Harry Potter
fandom and spent my "free" time perusing my old haunts – Mugglenet and The
Leaky Cauldron. The sites are so much
more polished now than in 2007 – run more as a business than as the hobby it
was born from. The forums have
discussion groups neatly separated according to book or movie number, and the
podcast has sponsors. Some of the
community from 2007 is still around – but there are all-new jokes that I don't
understand and the community is much more movie focused than it was when the
books were still coming out.

And now, the question remains: What is Pottermore? According
to this morning's announcement, Pottermore will be a free online "reading
experience" that allows the reader to become involved in the storyline. "Just as Harry joins Hogwarts, so can
you. You visit Diagon Alley, get sorted
into a house, cast spells and mix potions to help your house compete for the
House Cup." Rowling has written more
than 18,000 words of new content for the site, and though the site will also
offer exclusive e-book sales, you can experience the new content without
purchasing anything.

Pottermore opens in beta on July 31, 2011 (Harry's Birthday)
for one million test-users. Pottermore
will be open to all users in October 2011 (my guess is a Halloween release
date, so that the beginning of the virtual story coincides with the date of
Harry's parents murder by Voldemort).
The content for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2), will go live in spring 2012.

I thought my fun with the Harry Potter fandom ended in 2007
after the media frenzy following Deathly Hallows. But, as my creative-rescheduling this week
has proved, when a Harry Potter puzzle presents itself, I don't need a
Time Turner to fit it all in.