elaborate on why Titor stood so far out among the other alleged time travelers
It helps to be first in line. He wasn't the first person on this site or other similar sites to shout, "Look at me - I'm a time traveler!" But he
was the first on the then newly born public World Wide Web to pose a story that wasn't an obvious mocking joke. His physics was just awful, his politic was very predictable but he did have the unusual talent of being able to put five words together in a sentence, make it grammatically correct, have few spelling errors and a style that made the story interesting if not especially believable. In short, he didn't come off as the typical rambling idiot that typifies the OWETO.
It also helped that he had a female cohort who almost instantly came to his aid.
And it helped immensely that he had a movie studio, radio production studio and graphic arts studio at his beck and call in Celebration, FL. It made producing the nice looking props, photos, high tech schematics, The Book, The Radio Program for Syndication demo cd, etc. easy tasks to accomplish. Your average OWETO who came afterwards had none of that available to enhance the story.
What kept it alive after he stopped posting? We did. More specifically, Pamela and I did. This site cooled off drastically for a long time after he left (though it took about 7 months for that to happen). During that time Art Bell shut down his Post-2-Post forum. That's the other site that Titor posted on (Actually that's the
only site that "John Titor" posted on. He posted as TimeTravel_0 here). When that site shut down we had copies of the Titor threads and moved the discussion to Anomalies.net where I moderated the time travel forum. Pamela was there but became a Mod several months later. Pamela kept the topic alive because she was a believer. I kept it alive because we were a new site in the sense that we added the time travel forum and I wanted hits and posts. People came to see Pamela and me "play" and to take sides. What fun.
But it did keep the Titor meme going long after it would have otherwise died out.
Why did it thereafter come alive here once again? The answer is Celebration, FL.
Titor never stated where he was from other than Central Florida. In the mean time I discovered on this site that there was a Disney connection (Raul "MOP" ran advertising sites for Disney Corp) that included a connection to Celebration, FL and Disney World. Raul set up, moderated and ran Celebration's original community website and discussion forum cr 1999 - long before Titor started posting. The Celebration community website had hotlinks to several of Raul's websites including this site. In the summer of 2003 the John Titor Foundation came into being and they produced The Book. Where were they located? Celebration, FL - 606 Front Street to be more precise. What else was located at the same address? Larry Haber's law office and VISI Corp (where Larry was also Chief Counsel). Who is Larry Haber? He's an attorney and he runs the John Titor Foundation. What sort of practice did Larry have? Movie/Entertainment law. He was in private practice after working for both Disney and Universal. He put movie deals together. What did VISI Corp do? They were an advertising agency that had the aforementioned movie production studio, sound production studio and graphic arts studio on site. It seems that John Titor didn't pick this site at random. He discovered it through the hotlink on the Celebration BBS. These revelations sparked the Titor discussion here back to life.