Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in purplepopple's InsaneJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
10:23 am	Crosspost: The Anatomy of Fail Fan History's admins make an effort to try to document some of the major fails and wank in LiveJournal media fandom. When we cover it, we tend to really cover it, making a major effort to build comprehensive list links that cover all perspectives. Some of the major wank/fails we have covered include Race!Fail, Mammoth!Fail, Privilege wank (also called Warnings!Fail), Russet Noon, Lambda Fail and the Slash Debate. The Slash Debate is the one that is ongoing at the moment and I was curious as to how this particular fail's life cycle compared to other fails. I went to the Fan History pages, which sorted posts by date they appeared, and counted. I got the following chart: This chart only looks at the first 30 days of fail. For The Slash Debate, numbers are only current to January 25, 2010 and may be subject to change as we find more posts. The Slash Debate "officially" kicked off on January 29, 2009. Russet Noon kicked off on March 23, 2009. Lambda Fail kicked off on September 16, 2009. Race Fail kicked off on January 8, 2009. I stopped counting and moved new post totals over to Mammoth!Fail, which started on May 4, 2009. Privilege Wank started on June 18, 2009. There aren't any days in the first 30 where all wanks moved up or down together. For the second day, Slash Debate, Race Fail and Mammoth Fail both had a decrease in posts, whereas Privilege wank, Russet Noon and Lambda Fail saw an increase. Some of this might be the metafandom effect: Posts that are listed on and play to a metafandom audience have a lag as people use the list to find fandom news. Posts that play to smaller groups on LiveJournal, get featured on unfunnybusinees or fandomwank, or get a lot of attention and play to a wider audience than metafandom see a major interest in posting about it right away: There is no delay in timeliness because metafandom is slow to focus on those issues. Between day 10 and day 14, there tends to be a big drop off in posting volume with an increase after that. (The exception is Privilege/Warnings wank, which ended on Day 8. Considering the topic, it makes sense. People complained of being triggered by some of the posts.) On Day 26, three of the four still active wanks saw bumps in interest: Slash Debate, Mammoth Fail, Race!Fail. The exception was Russet Noon. By day 26, if the discussion continues to be ongoing, there is a greater awareness by a wider audience who might not have seen earlier posts and people who were silent, seeing that the discussion is not dying down, may feel compelled to speak up rather than remain silent. For all the aforementioned fails, minus Russet Noon, we have a list of people who posted. I was curious how large the population was that participated across those fails as often, it seems like the same people are participating again and again and that people are not learning lessons from one fail to the next. I compiled those lists and then created the following venn diagrams that show the people in common. Some of the participants across multiple fails surprised me and there were some names that I thought would be on there that weren't. For the second, it could be because people who are known to be involved in fail and wank are less about posting and more about commenting on other people's posts. Still, interesting bit of data worth keeping in mind when you see the next fail coming. You can begin to get an idea as to how long it will take, what the posting patterns will be and who to look out for as their involvement could signal major fail. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
4:28 pm	A history and my take on The Slash Debate This is a cross post from Fan History's blog. The Slash Debate continues to go on and the longer it has gone on, the more I wanted to comment on it. The problem is how to do that thoughtfully, acknowledging both sides and the shades of grey in between the major position. If you aren't aware, the Slash Debate kicked off in response to "Man on Man: The New Gay Romance ... ... written by and for straight women" by Gendy Alimurung in LA Weekly. Some gay men found the article objectionable because it ignored them completely in explaining about a genre that comes out of their own tradition. This kerfluffle was on the heels of LambdaFail, where straight writers were upset over having been deliberately excluded from awards honoring GLBT literature. I haven't completely followed the whole argument as it morphed into a discussion about m/m slash, but one of the major points that developed was that gay men were upset about straight women writing homoerotic fan fiction for their own sexual gratification, feeling that they were being stereotyped in a less than flattering light, that m/m slash was not helping the GLBT movement and that, ultimately, they were being othered in a genre that was fundamentally about them. This upset some members of the m/m slash community who felt that men were trying to tell women how to define their own sexuality, trying to restrict their freedom to write, that gay men had no reason to complain because they did the same thing to women with their drag performances, etc. This whole argument happened against a backdrop of 2009, where some members of fandom were upset about the portrayal of people of color in fiction, and how fandom treated people of color. Some of the dominant voices during that conversation insisted that white people sit and listen to the people of color, that people of color should be deferred that to when writing people of color, that fundamentally all white people were racists, that just because some people of color were not offended doesn't mean that a person's actions aren't racist. The Slash Debate flips some of that on its head: Gay men are not being deferred to in terms of how they are depicted by others, where those offended are slotted into a minority position that should be ignored because they are not representative. Where this argument differs from Race!Fail involves sex and the attempts to regulate kink, sexual interests, how we explore them, what is acceptable and not acceptable. People just aren't comfortable with people trying to dictate those interests and that's why the slash defenders are probably taking their position: We shouldn't be judged based on personal and private kinks and getting off on m/m slash a personal turn on for many people. When we perceive these as being attacked, we tend to attack back no matter how right or wrong the defense of these may be in the context of hurting others. I don't have a problem with your kink. ... Except when your kink involves shotacon and chan. But otherwise, your kink is your kink and it may not be my kink but that's okay as we all have different turn ons. I just dislike the rationalizations for why your kink is not actually offensive to people who find your public expressions of your kink as harmful to their identity, undermining their community and stereotyping them in a way that is unflattering and inaccurate. Own your kink but don't rationalize the problems away. That's hypocritical and harmful, especially harmful in this case if you're also purporting to support gay rights while doing what people perceive as undermining those. One of the cases of supporting the position that this material isn't offensive that has bothered me is that the fan fiction community that is being criticized is queer and those dissenting voices can be ignored. This is probably best expressed by Science, y'all and More Science. The author looks at some polls that demonstrate that fandom is over 50% queer. If you start breaking down the numbers from the polls that have publicly viewable results, the 50%+ number is largely a result of people who are not heterosexual and mostly bisexual. The lesbian population is about 10 to 15%. That's what those numbers show: Yes, the self selected population in those polls is female, mostly heterosexual, with a large bisexual population and a smaller population of lesbians. What the author doesn't show, and what is fundamentally important here, is that of the 500 or so people who answered LiveJournal polls with publicly available results? Between 10 and 20 of the respondents are male. Just ignore their orientation for now: 2% to 4% of respondents were male. The Slash Debate is an issue of gay men not appreciating how straight women depict them in m/m slash. The issue is not that of queer people not appreciating how straight women depict them in m/m slash. The female queer population is thus largely irrelevant to this discussion because, well, queer women are more privileged than gay males. If those polls demonstrated that queer males represented over 50% of our fannish population, that data would be relevant. Why the emphasis on gender and orientation? Because in the sexuality privilege Olympics, heterosexual males get gold. Heterosexual women get silver. Asexuals get bronze and last place. (Last place because their orientation is still considered a sexual dysfunction.) Bisexual women get fourth. Bisexual men get fifth. Homosexual women sixth. Butch and African American homosexual women get six and a half place. Homosexual men get seventh. Queen and African American homosexuals (in the context of US culture) get seven and a half place. This hierarchy of privilege in the context of American culture is important for understanding this argument. Gay men are less privileged than lesbian women. When lesbian women start talking about how this material is not offensive and how homosexuality is depicted in slash is not problematic, they are speaking from a place of privilege. In the United States, lesbian women are often portrayed as hot, sexy and not threatening to American definitions of masculinity. And anyway, a lesbian can always become straight if she sleeps with a guy. (Which, no, is not true but it is an attitude that I know some people hold which is why they see lesbians as less problematic than gay men. ) Added to that, American culture, and to a degree English culture, have idealized female friendship and elevated it. It is natural that women's relationships might go that way. One of the major exceptions to this involves butch lesbians, who challenge traditional gender roles, face their own discrimination and are rarely if ever seen on television compared to their non-butch counterparts. Gay men? They aren't that privileged in the United States. Gay men are seen as challenging traditional gender roles. Gay men felt the brunt of events like Stonewall. Gay men faced people more actively trying to legislate their sex lives, to criminalize their sex lives. When people sought to prosecute homosexual sex, they tended to go after gay men. In the United States, making jokes at the expense of male homosexuals is still much more tolerated. Remember all the Brokeback Mountain jokes? People were okay with that and there was no outrage over those, much less outrage than if some one had made similar jokes about a person of color. Added to that, when American culture talks about gay males, they tend to focus on their sex lives or on stereotypes involving queens. Yes, this is changing but gay men have often had it worse than lesbian women, and I do not see the two as being being on equal footing when it comes to privilege. Any implication that they are is probably misguided. (1) Their voices should not be silenced just because it gets in the way of enjoying your own kink. I've rambled on and I had another pointed I wanted to make: Some universes are harder to read and are more problematic for fan fiction writers, in terms of the accuracy issue and the potential to offend and get things wrong. Starsky and Hutch is set during the 1970s. If they got together and were out at work? It probably would not be pretty and their co-workers likely wouldn't be okay. Star Trek, as much as we might wish otherwise, does not present us with a happy future where homosexuality is tolerated and same sex relationships are viewed as normal. When we do see queer characters that aren't aliens, they tend to be evil. In Glee, we really don't see lesbians and the gay kid gets picked on. (But thankfully has a supportive parent.) In True Blood, the gay male gets murdered violently and is a drug dealer. Tolerance in that universe is not really implied. On The Good Wife, the implication is that some one is in the closet for the good of their own career. (Or was mistakenly labeled a lesbian and isn't bothered by it.) Lots of these universes are just heternormative. Squishy happy romances thus might need some care so that these realities are acknowledged, while at the same time not interfering with the audiences's kinks. When you're writing and when you're responding as a reader, that may be the most important takeaway from The Slash Debate. 1. If you're up on the historical GLBT movement, there are some major conflicts that have taken place between gay men and lesbian women. At times, they have had different agendas and their was a lot of resentment on both sides. It makes for a fascinating read if you're interested but I just didn't want to get into that in this post. (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
7:12 pm	Harry Potter fan fiction on FanFiction.Net I apologize for the writing quality.  I tend to like to present data.  My analysis and commentary tends to be minimal, stating the obvious and letting the reader speculate as to what exactly the data means.  Insiders can often explain patterns better than outsiders and for the Harry Potter fandom, I'm definitely an outsider. A friend of mine has been busy pulling data off FanFiction.Net this past week.  He found some rather interesting things: 8,566 Twilight stories on FanFiction.Net with no recorded reviews, 117,578 stories with at least 1 review. 93% of all twilight fics get reviewed at least once. Master of the Universe  has28,690 reviews on FanFiction.Net takes gold for most reviewed Twilight story on site. 19 Twilight stories on FanFiction.Net have 10,000+ reviews. Chunin Exam Day, a Naruto fanfic on FanFiction.Net, has over 10,000 reviews: 72 chapters, updated 4 days ago, 313k words and 10311 reviews http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3929411/Chunin_Exam_Day/1/ . It is the top Naruto story. The top 3 fandoms by stories on FanFiction.Net: Harry Potter [book] (437,590), Naruto [anime] (221,117), and Twilight [book] (126,590). ( Harry Potter fan fiction on FanFiction.Net ) (Comment on this)
1:20 pm	Plug. Plug. Pluggity plug. fandomnews Join? :) It is like a fandom newspaper of sorts. Get links to meta, fandom news stories, a selection of cross fandom meta. (In the three or so weeks we've been doing this, 115 fandoms have been represented. The most popular fandoms? Avatar with 36, Comics with 22, Supernatural with 13, Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, Twilight with 7, Glee and Harry Potter with 6, Australian Football League and Merlin with 5. Really broad selection including meta from sports, music, anime and literature. (Comment on this)
12:51 pm	How accurate are RapLeaf’s numbers? Can social media metrics be trusted for fandom studies? This is a crosspost from Fan History's blog.  It relates to some of the research I have been doing over on OzzieSport.com. Yesterday, I was poking around the Internet to see if anyone had done any large scale demographic study of the characteristics of online fandom because sometimes, I feel like I’m the only person doing this. Most of the research I see relies heavily on survey work, which can be tremendously self selecting in terms of population. As a result, I tend to be generally distrustful of this work for demographic analysis or where it doesn’t speak to a small select population and isn’t a case study. I did find one small study posted on Scribd titled Study on Sports Fans Demographics on Social Networks.  It was done by RapLeaf.  It had some interesting conclusions like half of hockey fans are female, compared to 40% for basketball and 35% for baseball.  It also concluded that 85% of sports fans are under the age of 35.  Fascinating.   They didn’t go much into their methodology much, beyond that they did this across social networks. I’m rather skeptical of RapLeaf’s methodology here.  If I go to Facebook’s advertising demographics page, I get 26,240 female fans on ice hockey in the United States and 61,420 male fans of ice hockey in the United States.  (Ice hockey being necessary because in some countries, the hockey means field hockey.  In others, it means roller hockey.)  For the Chicago Blackhawks, 135,000 (55%)  fans are male and 112,00 (45%) are female.    For the Boston Bruins, 33,780 fans are female and 56,740 fans are male.  These numbers are a bit different than 50% and I’m not sure all the major social networks combined are going to get populations larger than Facebook. Are there more than 90,000 American ice hockey fans on bebo, LiveJournal, LinkedIn, blogger, Quizilla, MySpace?  Are there more than 243,000 fans of the Blackhawks on those networks when combined?  Maybe but I some how doubt it. Quantcast has some demographic data up regarding gender breakdown of visitors to the NHL’s website.  Quantcast thinks that 59% of the visitors are male and 41% are female.  That’s much more in line with what the team specific data from Facebook is pulling.  The NHL also has a much bigger contributor pool, with about 2.1 million US visitors a month. If you look on RapLeaf’s site, they give you a sample report for the data they provide, which includes a gender break down for users of various social networks.  One of the sites they offer a gender breakdown for is LiveJournal.  LiveJournal does have a gender field for its users to fill out and they use this information internally; there is no public display.  In fact, when they it looked like they might have made that information public, people complained loudly.  There are no indications from RapLeaf’s site that they have a partnership with networks like LiveJournal or LinkedIn where they are given access to this non-public data.   Where exactly are they pulling that data from?  It really begs the question of accuracy of RapLeaf’s numbers in this case. I’d love to see a real demographic study about the composition of sports fandom and other fan communities.  It is a fascinating topic and can really go a long ways towards explaining how communities interact with each other, how they function and allow researchers to make better comparisons across communities.  I’m just not certain that the social media metrics provided by marketers, the only population that really seems to be working on this, can be trusted with their numbers any more than academic researchers with self selection survey populations can. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
4:08 pm	Case Study: Fan History’s Proposal For Being Acquired by the WMF This has been reposted from Fan History Wiki's official blog. In November 2009, Fan History Wiki approached the Wikimedia Foundation about possibly being acquired by them.  The motivations for this on the part of Fan History Wiki were to help the project continue with and grow its mission.    The choice to approach the Wikimedia Foundation was based on relationships developed by Fan History’s founder at events like RecentChangesCamp and through interaction in #wiki on irc.freenode.net. Fan History approached people connected to the Foundation, put forth a proposal, posted the proposal to the Foundation mailing list and to Strategy wiki.  The process broke down because of some problems.  This included lack of an established procedure for the acquisition process, communication problems and expectation issues. There are several recommendations that Fan History Wiki would make to the Foundation on how to fix this process.  The first is to decide if the Foundation is actually interested in new projects or acquiring existing projects.  The second is defining the roles of Meta-Wiki and Strategy wiki. The third is to create a list of staff members who would handle acquisition related requests.  The fourth is to create a clearly established procedure for how to handle this process. A copy of the complete case study can be found at http://www.fanhistory.com/FHproposal.pdf. (Comment on this)
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. (Comment on this)
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 ) (Comment on this)
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 ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
7:51 am	Repost: Continue to help us with our Geocities project! Crosspost from our blog. Our Geocities preservation project is moving right along. We have information on over 1,000 pages. We know there is a total of over 700,000 individual sites on Geocities. We still need your help... If you aren't sure about creating pages from scratch, consider editing one of our existing pages and improving that. The following list is our most popular articles so far that could use some help: The Jon Bon Jovi Slash Fanfiction Archive CSI Miami Fan Fiction Legolas Fanfiction Archives The GazettE - Fanfiction Archive The Ultimate Tekken Fanfiction Archive Kath & Kerr's JAG Fanfic Wraithfodder's Lair: Stargate Atlantis Fan Fiction Huan Zhu Ge Ge Fan Fiction Bully for You - The Anita Blake Fan Fiction Archive Baldur's Gate Fan Fiction Archive The Stefan and Laura Fan Fiction Archive The Neo and Trinity Fanfic Archive Femslash Fanfiction Archive My TMNT Fanfiction RainShine's Zac Hanson Fan Page Simon and Simon Fan Fiction Archive Starlight Anime Fanfiction Archive The Draco and Hermione Fanfiction Archive The Labyrinth List Fanfiction Archive The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest: Fanfiction Angel Ran's Gundam Wing Fanfiction Archive Harry Potter Fanfiction Recommendation List Jrock Fanfiction Archive Samuraiheart's Shounen / Shoujo-Ai Fan Fic Archive - geocities.com THE LEGION OF SUPERHEROES! Afterglow--x-files fanfic suggestions Ally's Farscape Fan Fiction Archive Angel/Buffy Fan Fiction Links Blarney's Sentinel Fanfic Blood Blade's Best of Ranma 1/2 Fanfiction Buffy Angel Supernatural Fan Fiction Recommendations Canley Fanfic- The Bill Fanfiction Archive GILMORE GIRLS FANFICTION ARCHIVE Rakna's Homepage Starsky & Hutch Fanfic TeW's Ranma Fanfic Page The Fallen: A Batman Fanfiction Archive Welcome to Semper Fidelis - A Willow/Harry Potter Fanfiction Archive What is Yaoi All My Children Beatles FanFic Ring DC Comic Fanfiction Archive GTL's due South page (Comment on this)
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. (Comment on this)
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. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
6:47 am	Repost: Most popular articles for October 6, 2009 This is a repost from Fan History's blog. AdultFanFiction.Net Beauty_and_the_Beast Canadian_Idol Cassandra_Claire Category:Anime Category:Television Digimon Ditto_Jessie Draco/Hermione Dragon_Ball_Z Exiled_girl Fan_fiction_archives FanDomination.Net FanFiction.Net FanFiction.net Fanhistory.com:About FanLib FanWorks.Org FicWad Freedom_of_Speech_Fanfiction Gilmore_Girls Harry_Potter_fan_fiction Hurt/comfort Jorja_Fox Kirk/Spock List_of_Merlin_LiveJournal_communities List_of_Star_Trek_LiveJournal_communities LiveJournal Main_Page Max/Liz Mortal_Instruments Mpreg My_Immortal Naruto Ontd_blueberry Outsiders Prince_of_Tennis Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan Race_Fail_2009 Raven_christina Roswell Russet_Noon Sakura_Lemon_Fan-Fiction_Archive Shotacon Silver_sporks Silver_Sporks_:_Draco_Dormiens_-_Chapter_2 Silver_Sporks_:_Index Special:Search Supernatural Tijuana_Bible Transformers Twilight Yu-Gi-Oh_Card_Maker_Wiki (Comment on this)
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 The_De_La_Vega_Library:_Zorro_Fan_Fiction_Archive_(Geocities) CSI_Miami_Fan_Fiction_(Geocities) 4 views The_Sam_and_Jack_Fan_Fiction_Challenge_Archive_(Geocities) Kath_&_Kerr's_JAG_Fanfic_(Geocities) Legolas_Fanfiction_Archives_(Geocities) 3 views The_Jon_Bon_Jovi_Slash_Fanfiction_Archive_(Geocities) Wraithfodder's_Lair:_Stargate_Atlantis_Fan_Fiction_(Geocities) Huan_Zhu_Ge_Ge_Fan_Fiction_(Geocities) Simon_and_Simon_Fan_Fiction_Archive_(Geocities) Starlight_Anime_Fanfiction_Archive_(Geocities) The_Stefan_and_Laura_Fan_Fiction_Archive_(Geocities) What_is_Yaoi_(Geocities) 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! (Comment on this)
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/Fanhistory.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: Techcrunch Mashable ReadWriteWeb Metafilter Henry Jenkin’s blog Linkspam on Dreamwidth Fandom wank on JournalFen Unfunnybusiness on JournalFen Sf_drama on LiveJournal 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, Organized, Uses social media, Detail oriented, 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 . (Comment on this)
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. (Comment on this)
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 . (Comment on this)
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. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 1st, 2009
10:57 am	Fan History: April 2009: Most popular fandoms This is a cross post from Fan History's blog. April has ended and I'm feeling in the mood to blog. So in celebration of April ending and rain letting up and May flowers coming, a list of the most popular fandom articles (based the number of article views) on Fan History for the month of March and a break down of the most popular articles on Fan History for year to date. April 2009: Most popular fandoms Cassandra Claire The Fast and the Furious - Movie interest Digimon Naruto Harry Potter Roswell Gundam Wing Twilight Supernatural Prince of Tennis April 2009: Most popular articles Draco/Hermione Russet Noon - Referenced on Fandom Wank and elsewhere Cassandra Claire - Page views down from last month Sakura Lemon Fan-Fiction Archive The Fast and the Furious User talk:Artistic Revolution - Related to being mentioned on fandom wank. AdultFanFiction.Net Caito - Person who posted the wank report on fandom wank FanFiction.Net Digimon January to April 2009: Most popular fandoms Cassandra Claire Naruto Digimon Twilight Gundam Wing The Fast and the Furious Harry Potter Dragon Ball Z Supernatural Pride and Prejudice (Comment on this)
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. (Comment on this)