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Below are the 16 most recent journal entries recorded in
purplepopple's InsaneJournal:
| Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | | 6:05 pm |
What does the Organization for Transformative Works look like? This is a crosspost from Fan History's blog. Please feel free to comment either on this post or over on the blog.The Organization for Transformative Works is a fan advocacy group that runs Fanlore and An Archive of Our Own. They were created on LiveJournal and most of their early and continued support continues to come from that community. Much of that has to do with the reasons they were created: The group perceived Fanlib as a threat to fandom as a whole, and had issues with how LiveJournal treated its fans.. After having done a bit of an analysis of the Twilight fandom as represented by lion_lamb, I was curious to see how otw_news looked, especially when compared to lion_lamb. How similar are they in terms of age, length of time on LiveJournal, the number of friends, the number of posts, etc. In the past, the group's members have talked about doing advocacy on behalf of fandom to change media perceptions of fans. The goal looked like they wanted to present their demographics as the norm. That is what I am looking for here. The Organization for Transformative Works's founders and supporters were also vocally critical of LiveJournal's commercial aspects, and discussed the need for a non-profit site that would cater to fan interests while being less susceptible to pressure from advertisers. The actions by LiveJournal taken during StrikeThrough 2007 were one of the prime examples cited by this group to rationalize this position. Many people talked about giving up paid accounts, not using Plus accounts, etc. Given that history, I am curious as to the behaviors of the organization's supporters in the almost two and a half years since the groups founding: Are they more likely than Twilight fans to use basic accounts, less likely to give money directly to a company whose ethos runs counter to the group's founding principles? The methodology for gathering data for this analysis is the same as the one for for lion_lamb: A sneak peak into the composition of the Twilight fandom. The community looked at is otw_news. The data was gathered on November 15, 2009 and pulled from publicly available profile information for people who both watched and belonged to the community. This means that 1,784 journals are included in the sample. When looking at this data, you have to remember that not everyone lists factually correct information. For this data, we assume that the obviously wrong data balances out in the end. (People list themselves at 100 and people list themselves as 5 years old.) This is the same methodology used for lion_lamb and we assume the error rate between the two is the same. One of the first things to look at is age of the membership of otw_news. The chart below includes the total number of people who list themselves as having been born in that year.  The average year of birth is 1975, with a median age of 1979.5 and mode of 1984. In terms of fandom, this is not a young group: The average member is about 35 years of age. Even if we assume that the mode year is more representative of the group, that still places age at 25. If we try to correct this data for error by removing 10 from each extreme of high and low years of birth, our year of birth average only increases to 1976.7, and the median and mode stay the same. If we remove 10% of the extreme from the sample, or 30 from each side, we get an average year of birth of 1977.3 with median and mode remaining unchanged. Assuming that our group of 11,000 Twilight fans on lion_lamb are representative of fandom on LiveJournal, the average year of birth is 1985.6, median year of birth is 1987 and the mode year of birth is 1989. If we try to correct for error and remove the extreme 10% of the sample, fans who are claiming Edward Cullen's birth year as their own as well as fans who claim an impossibly young age, lion_lamb has an average birth year of 1986.5 with median and mode remaining unchanged. When we compare the membership of otw_news to fandom, Organization for Transformative Works members and supporters are on average almost ten years older than their counterparts in the rest of fandom. If we assume that median is more representative, we are still looking at a an eight year difference. Mode is the only one where they are close, and even that is only by three years. In the case of fandom as a whole, the average is right out of college. The after college life experiences are very different in terms of forming our perspectives so these three years are critical and do demographically separate the two groups. It just cannot be said that the Organization for Transformative Works members and supporters are representative of fandom based on their ages. The other important demographic issue for LiveJournal based fandom is location. Some 1,111 members of otw_news list the country they live in. 6,330 members of lion_lamb list the country they live in. Both have garbage entries for places where people obviously do not live, places like the Romulan Neutral Zone, the Vatican City, Jesus's home town or the North Pole. In both sets, people listed cities or providences instead of countries. This data was removed. We are assuming that the members who do not list their home countries are represented proportionally by those that do. The Organization for Transformative Works members and supporters represent 41 countries. 63% of the membership are from the United States, 11% are from the United Kingdom, 7% are from Canada, 6% from Australia, 4% from Germany and other countries all have less than 1%. The top five countries population wise represent 91% of the organization's total population. The other 39 countries represent 9% of the organization's total population. lion_lamb represents 112 countries. 54% of their membership is from the United States, 6% from Canada, 5% from the United Kingdom, 5% from Australia, 3% from Germany, 2% from the Philippines, 2% from France, 2% from Italy, 2% from Mexico. The top five countries represent 73% of the community's total population. The other countries represent 27%. The Organization for Transformative Works over represents for Americans, with about 10% more Americans the lion_lamb. The Organization for Transformative Works members and their supports also over represent for Brits, Canadians, Australians, Germans. They under represent for the Philippines, France, and Mexico. The top five countries by membership over represent by about 20%. It cannot be said that the national representation of the Organization of Transformative Works is representative of the fan community on LiveJournal. There are some other issues regarding how representative patterns for the Organization for Transformative Works are when compared to the whole of fandom on LiveJournal with lion_lamb being defined as fandom. For year of registration, lion_lamb had the median and mode of 2008 for registering. The average registration year is 2007.07 in comparison. Members of this community are updating, with a last update year average of 2008.66, mode of 2009 and median of 2009. Compare this to otw_news, where the average registration year was 2004, with the median also being 2004 and the mode being 2003. Members and supporters of the Organization for Transformative Works became members of LiveJournal much earlier. Three years is a lifetime on the Internet. This is another example of otw_news follows not being representative of fandom on LiveJournal. otw_news members have posted an average of 858.6 times, with a mode of 492 and a mode of 1. Compare that with lion_lamb members who have posted an average of 132.25 times, a median of 11 times and a mode of 1 time. Again, the Organization for Transformative Works members and supporters are not representative of fandom on LiveJournal. These patterns hold true for other variables such as number of friends where otw_news members have almost 50 more on average and almost 95 in terms of median. It holds true for tags, memories, and virtual gifts. In all cases, members of otws_news have much higher averages than their fandom counterparts. All of this reaffirms the same idea: Members and supporters of the Organization for Transformative Works do not represent fandom in that they are demographically distinct from fandom on LiveJournal. otw_news members also differ from their fandom counterparts in that they do not use LiveJournal the same way: They use LiveJournal much more actively in their personal space than the rest of fandom. That concluded, the next issue is LiveJournal account status. The issue of paying LiveJournal was a big one. Around the time that Strikethrough happened, LiveJournal offered permanent accounts for sale. Some people affiliated with the later founding of an organization like OTW advocated that people unfriend those who bought permanent accounts. Other people openly talked about allowing their paid account status to expire as a method of expressing unhappiness with the site. Two and a half years later, what is the status of members and supports of the Organization for Transformative Works in terms of paying for LiveJournal?  otw_news members pay or have paid for their accounts. 36% have Paid Accounts. Many (15%) have permanent accounts, where they paid at least $150 for this status. A smaller percentage (18%) have plus accounts, which offer additional features in exchange for viewing additional ads. When compared to lion_lamb, otw_news members way over-represent in paid accounts and permanent accounts. Despite the issues of Strikethough, not all of which have been resolved, people affiliated with the Organization for Transformative Works are much more willing to pay for LiveJournal than their fandom counterparts. Still, there is some obvious shift from the group, where people are willing to sacrifice functionality in order to view fewer ads and thus potentially give LiveJournal less income; there is an 18% difference in basic accounts from otw_news to lion_lamb. Are the buying habits of a cross-fandom section, and their choices to expose themselves to additional ads, consistent with the attitude expressed by members and supporters during the time they lambasted LiveJournal's beholdenment to advertisers? It is hard to make a conclusive judgment based on the data we have available. | | Monday, November 16th, 2009 | | 8:31 pm |
lion_lamb: A sneak peak into the composition of the Twilight fandom This is a cross post from Fan History's blog.lion_lamb is one of the biggest Twilight specific LiveJournal communities. It has, as over November 15, 2009, about 16,600 members, 23,128 Journal Entries, 113 Tags, 1 Memory, 44 Virtual Gifts, and 9 Userpics. It is big and as influential as a number of other fansites in terms of sharing information. I've always been interested in demographic surveys of fandom. There has been a fair amount of market research done that would be of interest to people involved with fan studies but a lot of that remains locked, controlled by the people who produce it. There are people who produce great big data sets involving social media sites but a lot of that work is not easily mine-able by fan studies folks either, or the scope excludes them. Getting a picture is just hard. ( lion_lamb: A sneak peak into the composition of the Twilight fandom ) | | Saturday, November 7th, 2009 | | 7:55 am |
How to be a good fandom report (on Fan History) This is a crosspost from Fan History Wiki. We are crossposting it to our blog as we'd like to expose it to a wider audience because we think the information contained in it might be useful for other wiki projects and for people to better understand how to do a good job at telling the history of fandom events that are happening in the moment.. Please feel free to comment here, or on the talk page for this article to help improve it. Please also feel free to edit the on wiki version to make those improvements. Introduction Help Fan History improve, be more comprehensive and cover breaking fandom news. Covering major fandom news in the moment, as they happen, is important because articles can be used as quick reference guides for people who are curious as to what exactly happened and this information can be difficult to follow without a good, overall guide. It also helps with the preservation of material that may later disappear (via deletions or expiration of links) and allows for current events to be put into a historical context. We need your help to cover breaking fandom news. In covering breaking news, there are three things you should keep in mind: - Strive for being unbiased. Where bias is hard to avoid, present multiple perspectives. Ask for help from other editors to review and remove what might be biased language.
- Strive to tell a cohesive narrative. In quickly evolving events, it is crucial to understand how and when things evolved.
- Be organized. Compiling a link list is often the best way to begin.
( Sources, naming conventions, how to write, avoiding bias ) | | Thursday, October 15th, 2009 | | 7:51 am |
| | Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 | | 8:09 am |
MLB Game Attendance and Alternative Social Network Group Engagement In 2009, the New York Yankees averaged the second highest per game attendance of any team in Major League Baseball. On LiveJournal, there was only one team with more communities dedicated to it, only one team with more total members of those communities, and only one team with more posts and total comments. On bebo, the Yankees had more groups dedicated to them, more total members, more total profile views and more total loves than any other team. The Florida Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates and Oakland Athletics have the lowest average per game attendance in Major League Baseball. There are only one or two communities on LiveJournal, LinkedIn and bebo dedicated to these teams. Social media is an increasingly popular tool to connect with others who share your same interest. Sports fans, baseball fans, fans of Major League Baseball teams are participating on social media to do just that. They are on popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Sports fans and Major League Baseball fans are also on less popular networks liked bebo, BlackPlanet, CafeMom, Dreamwidth, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, orkut. The less popular networks are not examined as often ones with greater traffic and more media attention. The discussion regarding social networks, and the sports and Major League Baseball communities located on these sites is even less. These sites are worth analyzing to answer questions such as: Is there a relationship between the number of communities on social networks and a team’s at ballpark attendance? Is there a relationship between the volume of activity on these networks and ballpark attendance? Is there a correlation between size of a community in members and attendance? MLB Game Attendance and Social Network Group Engagement seeks to answer those questions and a few related ones. The results show that baseball communities dedicated to Major League Baseball teams are large and well established on several social networks like bebo, LiveJournal, LinkedIn and orkut. There is a community presence on other networks including biip, BlackPlanet, Blurty, CafeMom, DeadJournal, Dreamwidth, Eons.com and InsaneJournal. Community does not exist on BIGADDA, buzznet, cloob.com, DontStayIn, Inksome, JournalFen and VampireFreaks.com. Where communities exist on a network, so does a correlation between the size of that community by team using the average number of people attending games featuring that team and using the percentage average game attendance. In general, the more people on average attending a team’s games, the larger and more active social network community around that team. There is a predictive value where you can determine the size of a community or average attendance based on the other variables. A copy of MLB Game Attendance and Alternative Social Network Group Engagement can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/baseball.pdf. | | Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 | | 10:28 am |
Putting aside our differences for the greater good of fandom At Fan History, we've been busy trying to preserve the history of fandom on Geocities. This is extremely important and we've hard at work since the news came out in July. This task would best be accomplished by a group of people, where different fandom projects were being coordinated. To this end, Fan History has tried to reach out several times to the folks at the Organization for Transformative Works for assistance. We've sent them e-mails, tweeted looking for people to get in touch, made posts on our LiveJournals asking people to help us get in touch with them. Most recently, we commented on their LiveJournal community. So far, all we've received in return is aching silence. Our replies are not returned. Time is quickly ticking down. It is likely that Fanlore and Fan History are overlapping in some areas and completely lacking in the same areas. This makes no sense to us at Fan History. We need to put aside our personal differences, work together for one big last push in the 10 days before Geocities closes. We need to coordinate to preserve this history of fandom, so that there will be a record of it, so that when people talk about fandom during the late 1990s and early 2000s, we have good secondary sources to cite as our primary sources are disappearing. It is important. We need to work together. Yes, there has been bad blood between Fan History and some of the people at the the Organization for Transformative Works. It needs to be put aside for the greater good. That's one of the biggest lessons I've taken away from Race Fail: Principles can and often should trump personal loyalties. So if you know some one at the Organization for Transformative Works, please ask them to finally get in touch with us. We would love to work together for one last push to preserve the history of fandom on Geocities. | | 6:47 am |
| | Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 | | 8:37 am |
Repost: Please help edit our Geocities fansite articles! The following is a repost from Fan History's blog.Fan History has used some automation to help create articles about fansites and fan fiction archives. (This is outside the fabulous job that Sidewinder has done by manually adding this information.) All of these articles have (Geocities) in the title so that we can readily identify these articles. With the end of Geocities fast approaching, we could really use some help with what are our most popular articles of this type to date. Screencaps would be awesome. Adding information to the timeline, who maintained them, where the sites are moving to (or if they aren't) is really important to get. Because of the interest in these sites, improving these would be nice to have as a priority. The_Ultimate_Tekken_Fanfiction_Archive_(Geocities) is our most popular article with (Geocities) in the title. The following also have views:
5 views 4 views 3 views Any help improving these articles would be very much appreciated. We need to save our history before it is gone forever. Things like screencaps are important for understanding trends. (Passions sites tended to be purple. Just writing the history of a site? You don't get that detail.) Please help! | | Friday, October 2nd, 2009 | | 2:32 pm |
Help Wanted: Fandom Journalist/Reporter This is a repost from Fan History's blog.Fan History LLC Fandom Journalist/Reporter Are you passionate about fandom? Do you love to see how celebrities are interacting with fans? Do you check our how professional authors treat their fans? Do you ever read blogs by professional athletes and musicians to see what they think about their die hard fans? Do you want a unique experience with a no-profit start up corporation where you can do something with your obsessions? Company Background: Fan History LLC is a developing entertainment company focused on our core products of an wiki and a fan fiction, fan art and fan vidding link site. Fan History was founded two and a half years ago and incorporated 6 months ago by Laura Hale. In that period, Fan History has grown from a wiki with a few hundred pages and 200 visitors a month to a become a wiki with over 800,000 pages and getting over 55,000 unique visitors a month. We offer fans and entertainment related companies information that cannot be found elsewhere including a history of fan communities, the Internet’s largest directory of fans grouped by community, metrics data regarding the growth of fandom community and more. To learn more about our company and our sites, visit http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Fanhistor y.com:About . Role Description and Responsibilities: Fan History LLC is currently seeking candidates interested in a part-time fandom Journalist/Report position. This is an unpaid volunteer position that can be made into an unpaid internship position. It is virtual so much of the work will be done remotely where you will interact with Fan History LLC’s team via e-mail, instant messenger, phone, and face-to-face depending on location. The primary responsibility of the Fandom Journalist will be to document major in fandom news stories. As such, the Journalist will be responsible for assignments and projects that include: - Monitoring major fandom related news sources including:
- Fandom wank on JournalFen
- Unfunnybusiness on JournalFen
- Ohnotheydidnt on LiveJournal
- Metafandom on LiveJournal
- Creating and updating articles about breaking fandom related news stories.
Candidate Qualifications: Fan History LLC is seeking some one knowledgeable about popular culture or fandom with the following qualifications: - Experience editing wikis,
- Ability to distance self from topic reporting so reporting is unbiased,
- At least intermediate writing skills, and
- Willingness to learn about different fan communities.
This position reports directly to the Founder. This is an immediate opportunity and we are seeking candidates that can work a minimum of 5-15 hours each week. The weekly schedule is extremely flexible and can be developed around a candidate’s availability. This position requires a minimum of an 8-10 week commitment. If you are interested, please contact Fan History’s founder at laura@fanhistory.com . | | Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | | 11:02 am |
Relationships between game attendance and baseball community size on LiveJournal and its clones This is a crosspost from Fan History's blog.I'm working on another little analysis of fandom. This time I am looking at the size of baseball fandom on various social networks. I've finished getting data for LiveJournal and its clones. I thought some people would be interested in this before I publish a complete analysis in the next few weeks.  I got the average attendance for home and away games. (And combined attendance.) This information was by team. I then compared this to the current size of team specific fan communities on LiveJournal by finding all the communities dedicated to a team. I got the total number of communities, total members, total watched by, total posts, total comments. I repeated this for LiveJournal's major clones: Blurty, DeadJournal, Dreamwidth Studios, Inksome, InsaneJournal, JournalFen. I then ran correlations. The simple conclusion so far: - LiveJournal community size variables tend to correlate with home, away and combined attendance across the board. The only category with a strong correlation for all variables is the number of communities. Of all the services and categories, only LiveJournal has strong correlations. (That being a Pearson's Correlation of .5000 and above.)
Blurty correlates all but total comments for Away attendance.
Dreamwidth correlates for Total Posts and Home attendance, and all but total comments for Away attendance.
InsaneJournal correlates for all categories, but has no correlation above .5000.
Inksome and JournalFen have no specific communities dedicated to baseball. DeadJournal has two, but neither of those communities have any posts or comments made in reply to them. | | Friday, September 25th, 2009 | | 12:13 pm |
Fan Fiction’s Predictive Value For Nielsen Ratings On January 15, 2009, CSI had one of its highest rated episodes all season. On that day, people published 26 new pieces of fan fiction, the most stories posted on the same day as an episode had aired. On September 25, 2008, CSI had it third lowest ratings day all season and people posted zero new stories on that date. Fan fiction is a really popular outlet for fan expression of interest in television shows. The stories are creative, explore plot lines in the show and, according to many fans, help market a series in a positive way. Fans often argue that their activities mirror larger interest in a show, and that producers should pay more attention to them and cater to their fannish interests as the example provided seems to demonstrate. Fan Fiction’s Predictive Value for Nielsen Ratings tests this fan theory and answers the question: Does the volume of fan fiction published in the period around when an episode airs correlate to Nielsen Ratings? To answer this question, fan fiction daily posting stats were gathered for the one week period around television shows where fan fiction communities existed and Nielsen Ratings were available for that show. The fan fiction data was compiled from six archives: FanFiction.Net, fanfiktion.de, FanWorks.Org, FicWad, SkyHawke, and Freedom of Speech Fan Fiction. The Nielsen Ratings data included over 720 episodes representing thirty-nine shows. Once this data was compiled, it was analyzed using Pearson’s Correlation and linear regression. The results confirmed what many fans already suspected: Levels of fan activity, specifically in terms of the production of fan fiction, mirrors interest specific episodes of television. Fan fiction can be used to predict Nielsen Ratings. The predictive value is strengthened in several cases when it is broken down by network, genre or specific television show. The best networks for predicting Nielsen Ratings are CBS, The CW, Disney, Fox and USA. Comedy, crime comedy, crime drama, medical comedy and sports drama are the best genres for predicting Nielsen Ratings. The strongest correlations for television shows for predicting Nielsen Ratings are Burn Notice, CSI, Eli Stone, Friday Night Lights, Gossip Girl, Grey’s Anatomy, Hannah Montana, Heroes, iCarly, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Life, Prison Break, Psych, and Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles. This information is potentially valuable to parties with a vested interest in a television show’s performance. By analyzing content patterns around periods with high volumes of fan fiction and high Nielsen Ratings, comparing that to periods of low posting volume and lower Nielsen Ratings, producers can make changes to maintain high interest amongst fans. Non-American television networks and advertisers can better predict how their shows will perform. This method of analysis can help organizations save money as it is cheaper to monitor and track than other analytic tools.
A copy of Fan Fiction’s Predictive Value for Nielsen Ratings can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/FanFicNielsen.pdf . The appendix can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/FanFicNielsenAppendix.pdf . | | Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 7:11 pm |
“Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, 'What's in it for me?'” Brian Tracy (American television host)
That is one of my new favorite quotes. | | Friday, May 1st, 2009 | | 10:57 am |
| | Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 | | 11:31 am |
Fanzines galore: 1,600+ fanzines added to Fan History This is a cross post from Fan History's blog.ROFLCOPTER ( purpose) flew on in an created roughly 1,600 articles about fanzines on Fan History. These fanzines represent a number of different communities including soccer, rugby, Rat Patrol, Star Wars, science fiction, Bon Jovi and punk. This brings the total number of articles we have about fanzines on Fan History to over 2,000. This makes Fan History one of the largest sources of information about Fanzines on the Internet. We're very excited about that because we love fanzines. Heck, a lot of our early information on the wiki was about fanzines. Why do we love fanzines? Because fanzines give us a peek into fandom's past, before the Internet was around. They were part of a subculture, an underground culture which helped people connect to part of a larger community that might otherwise not be as accessible. Fanzines provide a record of our history that we can touch. And they are a tradition that continues even now... When we created these articles, we tried to have some basic information. This included title, fandom, the year the fanzine was published, who the publisher was and the source for this information. As a result, our articles aren't very comprehensive. That's really where we need your help. If you know these fandoms and fanzines, please help edit to improve that information to improve on our fanzine stubs. What awards did these zines win? What was their impact on the fan community? Was the zine the first one that appeared in that fan community? Where was it published? What was the size and what was the content? What happened to the fans who produced the zine? Do you have a copy of the zine? Any information you can add would be appreciated. And if you know of a fanzine that isn't represented but want to put it on the wiki, copy and paste our fanzine template to your new article, add your information and save the page. If you need any help formatting or creating a new article, let me or another admin know as we'll happily help you with that. | | Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 | | 10:59 am |
Scott Brown on Sherlock Holmes, Obsessed Nerds, and Fan Fiction Fan History got linked to in an article about the history of fan fiction on Wired.com. It took me a few days of seeing that referrer before I finally checked it out but it falls into the realms of pretty damned cool. :D Go read the article. It is an interesting piece about Sherlock Holmes fandom. :D | | Saturday, March 15th, 2008 | | 3:03 pm |
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