Why ABBA World is now ABBA Omnibus

When the announcement that the ABBA Museum project was to become the ABBAWORLD touring exhibition was made on June 2nd last year I faced a dilemma. My website was also called ABBA World – could there be two entities with the same name?

I discussed changing the name of my site over dinner with some friends that night – by coincidence I was in Stockholm, having travelled there for what should have been the opening week of ABBA the Museum. We threw out some possible contenders for a new name over a couple of bottles of wine – sadly most of them forgotten the next morning.

I thought it over for a long time. What new name would be appropriate and understandable to people, and how would I go about changing not only the website (all 900 + pages of it) plus the blog, Twitter, Facebook, and all the other parts of what had become quite a network of interconnected sites.

Finally not long ago I was reading a book (1001 Inventions that Changed the World) and came across the word “omnibus”. Omnibus comes from the Latin word meaning “for all”. It’s the root of the word “bus” and can also mean “a collection of works on a similar topic brought together”. That struck me as the perfect new name for my website.

So I started seriously investigating how to change the name and URL of the various ABBA World entities. Some of it proved to be incredibly easy, some of it difficult if not impossible. So on November 1st ABBA Omnibus was born.

The conspiracy-minded will probably assume that Touring Exhibitions or Universal Music have “played the heavy”, insisting that the name be changed. But I can assure you that couldn’t be further from the truth. No one has ever approached me to change my website. This is entirely my own decision, made simply to avoid the growing confusion between the two entities. If you think it’s absurd that anyone could confuse the two, here’s an example: when tickets for the ABBAWORLD exhibition in Melbourne went on sale earlier this year, for a couple of hours the ticket site used the logo from my site.

As I write this the changeover is incomplete, with some parts of the network yet to get the new name, and will probably remain that way for at least the rest of this month while I work though everything.

Please save the new URL www.abbaomnibus.net in your bookmarks or favorites, and if you have a link to ABBA World on your website please update it to the new site.

Tags: ABBA, ABBA Omnibus, ABBA World