Our admin staff loves the wiki community.  They are a helpful bunch, both in terms of content, back end issues, information structuring, etc.  Which gets to our point: We floated our proposal to merge with the on the foundation mailing list.  One of the issues that came up was our copyright policy.  At the time that we implemented it, we had talked to several people in the wiki community, wanted some sort of copyright protection from automated scrapers, etc.  We were leery of creative commons licenses because we didn’t necessarily think that they would offer us the protection that we might want.

But the discussion on the mailing list… has a point.  Even if we don’t make the move to WMF (which both sides need to want, where we both feel like compromises can be made to help each of our missions), we still need to address our copyright policy.  When I last had a serious conversation with Wikia about being acquired, Angela indicated that this would be pretty simple to change: Just do it.  (We would have had to change our policy to match the copyrights used by Wikia.)  This mostly seemed to entail: Announce the change, give time for people to comment or disagree, address edits made by those who don’t consent to the change, then just make the change.

Is it that simple?  And if we do change, what sort of copyright policy should we adopt?  We just don’t want to make such a change without really thinking it through because we don’t want a repeat of the problems that Transformers Wiki went through.  Have other wikis made copyright changes?  How did they handle it?  What are problems that wikis have faced using different licenses?

Fan History feels like it is at this point where, in order to further our mission, we need to expand our contributor base a bit. We’ve talked amongst our admin team about methods to do that. One solution that we’ve been considering is to find a for-profit company or a non-profit that would help us with our mission. Rejection from one for profit wiki related company. Now we’re talking to WMF. Before we did that, we contacted a few people inside the organization who gave us the same feedback: Most projects of this type come from inside of existing WMF projects. Most of them were not aware of projects outside WMF that had been brought into the fold.

If we were serious about this, we would need to float it on the mailing list.  We did and our proposal can be found at here. If you want to join the list, details are here.  The initial feedback is interesting and has given us a lot of food for thought.  If you have any feedback that you want to give us, please drop a comment here.

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 18, 1998, “Girl’s Night Out” by Jasen Harold Vokey was the first Digimon story posted to the Internet.

• On November 18, 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon was released in theaters in Belgium . [292]
• On November 18, 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon was released in theaters in France . [293]
• On November 18, 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon was released in theaters in Italy . [294]
• On November 18, 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon was released in theaters in Spain . [295]
• On November 18, 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon was released in theaters in Switzerland in the French speaking region. [296]

• On November 18, 2004, the CSI episode Ch-Ch-Changes originally aired in the United States. [252]

We’re getting hit with visits from at least four countries and ten visitors in the past half hour about people having connection problems with FanFiction.Net.  Beyond that, if there is an issue, we won’t know as we can access the site and FanFiction.Net doesn’t have any announcements on their site regarding downtime or other problems.

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.

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?

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. 

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 17, 1997, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode What’s My Line? (1) premiered on television in the United States. [275]
• On November 17, 1998, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Revelations premiered on television in the United States. [276]

• On November 17, 2000, the CSI episode Blood Drops originally aired in the United States. [249]
• On November 17, 2001, CSI premiered on television in Israel. [250]
• On November 17, 2005, the CSI episode A Bullet Runs Through It (2) originally aired in the United States. [251]

• On November 17, 1999, Gorillaz.com was registered. [60]
• On November 17, 2001, the Charmed mailing list Phoebe_n_Cole_FanFic was created and dedicated to the characters Phoebe and Cole. [61]
• On November 17, 2005, the LiveJournal community 10_au was created. It was a fan themed community where fan fiction authors agreed to write ten stories based on the themes that the community stipulated. [62] Fandoms represented by this community included Final Fantasy VII, Fruit Basket, Gravitation, Gundam Seed, Gundam Destiny, Mulan, Mutant X, Prince of Tennis, Rurouni Kenshin, Weiß Kreuz, Yu-Gi-Oh

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 16, 2001, the Snapeslash community benefited as a result of the opening of the first Harry Potter movie in theaters. This is mostly owed to fans finding Alan Rickman attractive. [58]
• On November 16, 2001, the first Harry Potter movie was released. [59]

• On November 16, 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon was premiered in Los Angeles, California in USA . [291]

• On November 16, 1999, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode The Initiative premiered on television in the United States. [274]

Two people have reported to me that FanFiction.Net is having issues with pages not loading. If you think it is you, it might not be.

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 15, 1998, the mailing list MTA_Stories was created. [30]

• On November 15, 2001, the CSI episode Slaves of Las Vegas originally aired in the United States. [244]
• On November 15, 2004, the Grissom/Paul Millander mailing list gilnpaul4evah was created. [245]
• On November 15, 2006, the Grissom/Sara fan fiction mailing list GSR_FANFICTALK was created. [246]
• On November 15, 2007, the CSI episode Goodbye and Good Luck originally aired in the United States. [247]

• On November 15, 1998, the mailing list MTA_Stories was created. [51]
• On November 15, 2002, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was released in theaters.
• On November 15, 2002, the Star Trek: Enterprise mailing list ent_recs was created. [52]
• On November 15, 2003, The Libertines LiveJournal community albion_fic was created for posting Libertines and Libertines-related fic. [53]
• On November 15, 2003, the GreatestJournal Led Zeppelin community hats_off_to_zep was created. [54]
• On November 15, 2005, the Supernatural episode Home originally aired on CW in the United States. [55]
• On November 15, 2005, the Supernatural real person fic LiveJournal community super_real was created. [56]

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• Janeway7 was founded on November 14, 2000.
• On November 14, 2002, the Anne Rice LiveJournal community annerice was created. [48]
• On November 14, 2004, the LiveJournal community ggsocialites was created for the Gilmore Girls’s Rory/Logan pairing. [49]
• November 14, 2006 saw The Walt Disney Company release the Volume 2 DVD set. This set included the series pilot movie “To The Rescue“.
• On November 14, 2006, the video game Naruto: Uzumaki ninden was released in the United States. [50]

• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.

• On November 14, 2000, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Fool For Love premiered on television in the United States. [273]

• On November 14, 2002, the CSI episode Fight Night originally aired in the United States. [243]

An Archive of Our Own is going to come out of closed beta in the near future.  Before that happened, we got a snap shot of the site to see what fandoms were included so that we can see how their representation changes after they officially launch their open beta.  If you have no clue who this archive is, they were created in response to FanLib.   

What is interesting about the list of most popular fandoms on An Archive of Our Own is that it doesn’t line up with what fandoms are currently popular on LiveJournal or FanFiction.Net.  It will be interesting to see after they launch if this picture changes.

Apologizes for writing quality.  This is stream of consciousness.

I love Wikia and I love Mahalo.  Both do interesting things in the wiki community, are fascinating to watch and offer important lessons to people running their own wikis.  Jason from Mahalo would really like to recruit Wikia contributors for Mahalo.  He’s offering a financial incentive to switch. 

It isn’t necessarily the right approach.  First, most Wikia wikis are not about individuals but rather groups.  He should be focused on pulling the whole admin team over to Wikia.  Second, he’s talking about contributors to his wiki earning revenue on a page by page basis.  Wikia wikis are complex and have a huge number of pages, or at the least the ones Jason should be trying to recruit. He’s only offering a single page solution, not a multipage solution. He’s also not offering an option to port the content from Wikia to their own user controlled subdomain. 

If I’m mad at Wikia and my community on my wiki is also mad at Wikia and we want to leave, Jason can’t get us because there is no option to port from Wikia to Mahalo.  (I’m also not certain that Mahalo could do this if they wanted to.  The licenses between the two may not be compatible.)  If there is no porting, I’m pretty much stuck on Wikia.  (Why leave Wikia?)  If I do want to leave and my community wants to leave, we might be able to do it easily if we’re talking a limited subset of pages.  (Less than 500 is easy enough to copy and paste over.  [Wiki farms like yourwiki.net can help you move things over easily too.])   Mahalo is not even going to be a consideration because you get even less control community wise and content wise on Mahalo than you do with Wikia. 

Porting over from Wikia to Mahalo is even more problematic.  I might have my wiki about Twilight that has 20 pages.  I might be tired of Wikia because the ads are annoying and I like the idea of making money off content.  Wikia isn’t ever going to do that.  Can I move it to Mahalo?  Probably not.  On Wikia, I could create my special Twilight wiki because Wikia allows duplicate wikis around the same topic.  Mahalo is a bit like Wikipedia and it doesn’t seem designed that way.  The pages that will do best for that subject are going to be the obvious ones.  In the case of Twilight, that will be the Twilight page.  100 people can’t profit off Twilight and can’t curate it.  Communicating with the community editing it, another major plus for Wikia, is difficult.  The nature of Mahalo thus locks  out those power mad Wikia users who create small specific wikis around subject areas where there is already a bigger wiki on Wikia.

The money aspect is going to turn off a number of potential Wikia users.  If I’m a huge Twihard, I’m going to obsessively create content about Twilight because I LOVE TWILIGHT! ZOMG! THE SPARKLY VAMPIRES! I LOVE THEM!  My motivation is going to be based less on monetary return and more on my obsessive love and expressing it.  I’m going to look for like minded people.  Wikia is a turn on because it is a venue where I can create a clear product of my obsession and meet other like minded fans.  (Go Team Edward!)  Mahalo has limited interaction and money just cheapens my love.  Twihards and other obsessive fans are ones Jason should be courting because they produce loads of content for free because they are so obsessed.  In a number of cases, highly motivated fans who love the source create high quality content.  (See Wikipedia.)  Those folks are needed as fans as the pages they create will become great resources for people to cite.  Fans who create for money often think differently or misunderstand their audience, creating less desirable content.

If Jason wants to effectively market to unhappy Wikia users, he’s got to find a better solution.  His current methods are just off the mark.  Money needs to be de-emphasized, community more emphasized and he needs to demonstrate to the community he is courting that he is trust worthy and that users will have community control and content control, that he’ll support leaders in those community while putting monetization as a secondary goal.  I just don’t know if doing that is something that would be compatible with Mahalo’s goals as the two appear to be catering to different audiences.

We’ve seen a small increase in traffic to the wiki (10 visits to 40 visits a day) in the past week to Russet Noon.   If you are wondering what happened, we are too.  This is what we know and we’ve updated the wiki to say:

As of October 26, 2009, visits to the site returned a “Page Not found” error. DomainTools.com marks the domain as “Registered And No Website” under its Server Stats tab.[75] It is unclear why the site was deleted. The corresponding MySpace page is gone, with the note from MySpace confirming that either the account was either cancelled by the owner or deleted by MySpace.

That is what Tikatu found out.  She also blogged about this issue on her JournalFen account.  If you know, let us know.  We’d love an update.

I got an e-mail two or three days from some one who found this blog and asked for affiliate links.  They touted their own page rank and how it would be to both our advantages to do this.  My reply was basically: Why are you asking me for links on the blog when you can get rel=follow blogs on the wiki, where the links can be on pages more targeted to their audience? The person replied back with something like: Fan History is a much better place! Here is more info on why we should affiliate link!

People?  Don’t send me those type of e-mails.  Don’t send others those sort e-mails.  Fan History Wiki is a wiki.  You want links?  All you have to do is follow our rules and our self promotion guidelines.  You don’t have to ask us if this is okay.  We encourage that because it makes the wiki more relevant and more useful.  If you want more incoming links, go ahead and add them to Fan History.

Are we going to add links to you on Fan History at your request?  Maybe… but generally only if you’re asking for a front page link because you have big, big fandom news that you think everyone landing on the main page needs to know about.  (Ficathons, charity events, law suits, contests, that sort of thing.)  If the link is good enough because your news is that good, we’ll be happy to blog about it.  Outside that, e-mails for reciprocal link are pretty much ignored.

The only other exception is if you want us to create a lot of articles (50+) about your site.  Then please feel free to e-mail us with as many details as possible, why you want those pages, what is required of us, how this will help Fan History be better at completing its mission.

Please, no e-mails requesting affiliate linking.

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 13, 2005, the mailing list superjared was created. [111]

• On November 13, 2003, the CSI episode Invisible Evidence originally aired in the United States. [242]
• On November 13, 2001, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Tabula Rasa premiered on television in the United States. [272]

• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.

• On November 13, 2001, FanFic.net upgraded “the memory in the server to 320MB of RAM and moved most of the mail list from Majordomo to Mailman. “[45]
• On November 13, 2005, the LiveJournal community xena_vids was founded for the posting of Xena fanvids. [46]
• Stories for first time participants in lazytown_santa had their stories due on November 13, 2006. [47]

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 12, 2001, the German language mailing list janeway_chakotay was created. [43]
• On November 12, 2002, animedrabble was founded.
• On November 12, 2002, the Ghostbusters LiveJournal community ghostbusters was created. [44]

• On November 12, 2007, the InsaneJournal asylum heroinaddicts was created. [290]
• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.

• On November 12, 2002, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Conversations with Dead People premiered on television in the United States. [271]

• On November 12, 2004 the Gil Grissom slash CSI LiveJournal community grisslash was created. [241]

I love wikis.  I love wikis in the way that people go “Lulz! You treat wikis like too much serious buziness!”  When there are conversations about wikis that I can participate in and watch, I like to do that. I can learn a lot about what makes other wikis successful, how that can be applied to our own wiki work on Fan History, see  if our experiences on Fan History can help other wikis be more successful.  With that in mind, I’ve been trying to attend some of the organized chats in #wikimedia-strategy, which are for trying to help create a long term strategic plan for the Foundation.  These are some of my thoughts having been involved with two of those.

One discussion involved how wikiNews had issues.  The project isn’t viewed as credible enough for use by Wikipedia users.  WikiNews finds it hard to get quality articles and attract a lot of good editors because the project’s rules were created almost fully formed; these guidelines can be confusing, intimidating in terms of attracting new contributors, aren’t always clear and involve a lot of tedious hierarchy for news to point where it seems pointless to try.  To get around those issues, a lot of people just put the news on Wikipedia… because Wikipedia gets a lot of praise for how well they cover issues such as that.  This situation makes the one on wikiNews even worse.  The news on Wikipedia in many cases has a limited shelf life, where old news related articles like Balloon Boy will get deleted.  From my perspective, this is clearly a problem that needs to be addressed.

Another discussion involved why people weren’t editing Wikipedia.  One of my arguments was because some people had problems with other contributors, who they felt were rude and actively discouraging new people from contributing.  I’ve heard this from several people, saw it mentioned on my LiveJournal friends list, and it is one of my own issues.  Some one in the chat challenged this as not true.  There was a side discussion involving that, which devolved.  My understanding though is that there has not been a study to determine why people are not contributing to Wikipedia.

There was another discussion about the need for a WYSIWYG editor to be included in Mediawiki.  The consensus amongst developers appears to be that you cannot do that  with Mediawiki.  The other problem is that Mediawiki cannot do real time editing.  (Though people are trying to create extensions plugging in Google Wave to allow for real time collaborative editing on MediaWiki.)  Some people thought that Mediawiki’s software had pushed as many limits as it could; was it now time to scrap the software and create new software that could meet changing needs like real time editing and a WYSIWYG editor?  Developers seemed inclined to lean this way.

A separate discussion involved the question of: Is real time editing something that Wikipedia projects really need?  For high volume articles and Wikinews where timeliness is important, the answer appeared to be yes.  The people in the chat who appeared to be most loudly advocating a position that it is needed for a wider variety of articles were power contributors.  They did acknowledge that for the vast majority of articles, there won’t ever be two people editing an article to make it an issue.

A question was raised on the role of the Foundation supporting wiki related conferences.  The Foundation plans to continue this as a form of outreach.   There is not consensus of if they should be doing more support for conferences or if they should be working with other organizations for fund those conferences.

One issue that was some what contentious was that some people felt that most of the suggestions on the strategy wiki were dumb, stupid and never going to happen.  At least one individual felt that these suggestions should be deleted.  The representative from the foundation suggested instead that volunteers should use the reader feedback section to discuss  why those things won’t happen.  This didn’t really make some people happy as they felt it made it difficult to have  a real plan with all that junk there.  I tried to point out that in terms of a strategic plan that different people have different things they want/need to get out of Wikipedia so some of the things they desire may be a matter of perspective and slamming people’s good faith efforts wasn’t the best way to get quality feedback.

Some other things were mentioned that I will try to blog about at a later date.

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 11, 1999, the Anita Blake mailing list anitablakefanfiction was created. [38]
• On November 11, 2001, the Xena subtext mailing list Absolutely_Xena_and_Gabrielle was created. [39]
• On November 11, 2003, the LiveJournal community farscapeimprov was created for Farscape fan fiction. [40]
• On November 11, 2004, the LiveJournal community 3_ships was founded. [41] It is a threesome secret santa community. Fandoms represented by this community include: Angel, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, DCU, Doctor Who, Firefly, Harry Potter, House, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, Pirates of the Carribean, Stargate, Stargate Atlantis, Supernatural, X-Files.
• On November 11, 2004, the DeadJournal community btvs-lightsout was created for dark, angsty Buffy: The Vampire Slayer fan fiction. [42]

• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.
• On November 11, 2007, the FanFiction.Net forum Twilight Party Palace was created. [289]

• On November 11, 2002, the Blurty community willowandtara was created. [268]
• On November 11, 2004, the LiveJournal community 3_ships was founded. [270]

• On November 11, 2004, the CSI episode Formalities originally aired in the United States. [240]

• On November 11, 1998, Skinnerholics Anonymous! was created. [28]
• On November 11, 2004, the LiveJournal community 3_ships was founded. [29] It is a threesome secret santa community. Fandoms represented by this community include: Angel, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, DCU, Doctor Who, Firefly, Harry Potter, House, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, Pirates of the Carribean, Stargate, Stargate Atlantis, Supernatural, X-Files.

• On November 11, 2005, the mailing list superdays was created. [109]
• On November 11, 2005, the LiveJournal community sn_daily was created. [110]

During the past few days, we’ve been working on trying to visualize our organizational patterns on Fan History in order to understand our own patterns, how we conceptualize fandom, to check for organizational consistency, create tools to help users understand our organizational patterns, to identify areas where we lack stub content. This is our second post in this series. This one is about fan fiction archives.

Thus, we’re creating mindmaps like the one below that do that. The purpose isn’t to get a complete tree. (Some of the categories have 10, 50, 200 different sub categories. It isn’t timely.) It is to get enough of one to do the above. The one below is one of these mind maps. It looks at how we conceptualize blogs. Click on it for the link to the full size.

The structure isn’t complete for a lot of fandom specific categories.  That’s because for some things, there are over fifty categories.  Some of these were chosen as a representative sample.  I tried to put at least eight subcategories in those cases. 

What strikes me as obvious is the lack of FanFiction.Net appearing in more places.  If there is a category for it, which I’m almost certain there is, it wasn’t linked here.  That needs to be addressed.  Sugar Quill for Harry Potter also deserves its own subcategories.  We need subcategories for archives where we have user lists.  We’re also short on archives for sports and theater and actors.  The actor related archives might have been hidden or minimized because for a while, we didn’t really know how to organize them.  We also didn’t get many actor fan fiction related archives when we did our geocities preservation work. 

The Adult Fan Fiction archives section isn’t built really well and really lends itself to other questions, like should we be separating out archives with adult content into their own separate hierarchy?  And if we should, should we also be labeling articles that the sites, pages, concepts in question may deal with adult concepts?  Added to that, AdultFanFiction.Net isn’t included in that category at all so if the category should be there, AdultFanFiction.Net needs to be included.  (Unrelated, I would really love to do something like we did for Inuyasha-fiction.net and FanFiction.Net and YuleTide in terms of stories and people articles.)

There are a lot of multifandom fan fiction archives covering different genres and mediums.  This includes FanLib, AdultFanFiction.Net, MediaMiner.Org, and FanNation.  They are listed in multiple places like Comics fan fiction archives, Movie fan fiction archives, Television fan fiction archives.  The problem is that they are listed along side categories like Batman fan fiction archives, Harry Potter fan fiction archives, Charlie’s Angels fan fiction archives, Wonder Woman archives.  This, to me, doesn’t feel intuitive but I’m not sure how else to categorize these large massive multifandom sites and make them findable for people looking for fandom specific archives that they represent.  Maybe that’s more of an issue for articles, where we include these archives on the article pages?  It needs more thinking and some one to implement.

If you have any feedback on this tree, any questions about how it developed, we would love your feedback. Do the organic patterns we’ve developed make sense? Is this construction too artificial? Is it not logical? And if you’re really motivated, we’ve really like that feedback on the relevant talk pages for those categories.

During the past few days, we’ve been working on trying to visualize our organizational patterns on Fan History in order to understand our own patterns, how we conceptualize fandom, to check for organizational consistency, create tools to help users understand our organizational patterns, to identify areas where we lack stub content. 

Thus, we’re creating mindmaps like the one below that do that.  The purpose isn’t to get a complete tree.  (Some of the categories have 10, 50, 200 different sub categories.  It isn’t timely.)  It is to get enough of one to do the above.  The one below is one of these mind maps.  It looks at how we conceptualize blogs.    Click on it for the link to the full size

For blogs, we tend to organize by fandom type (music, sports, actors), by social networking site, by blogging site, by bloggers.  The inclusion of American bloggers on the top level probably isn’t the best place for it and later, some one should probably move that down into Bloggers -> Bloggers by country -> American bloggers.  LiveJournal is actually much deeper than you’re seeing here.  As we post others part of our tree, that might become a bit more obvious.

A lot of the blogs that we have are generally listed around a topic.  We have few fandom specific categories for blogs like that.  It would be nice to see that expanded, to have blogs listed beyond the ones present on social networking sites.

If you have any feedback on this tree, any questions about how it developed, we would love your feedback.  Do the organic patterns we’ve developed make sense?  Is this construction too artificial?  Is it not logical?  And if you’re really motivated, we’ve really like that feedback on the relevant talk pages for those categories.

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 10, 2005, the mailing list supernaturalfans was created. [107]

• On November 10, 2000, the CSI episode Who Are You? originally aired in the United States. [238]
• On November 10, 2005, the CSI episode A Bullet Runs Through It (1) originally aired in the United States. [239]

• On November 10, 1997, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode The Dark Age premiered on television in the United States. [266]
• On November 10, 1998, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Band Candy premiered on television in the United States. [267]

• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.

• On November 10, 1994, the Due South episode Chicago Holiday (1) originally aired on CBS. [33]
• On November 10, 2000, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: The Movie – Endless Waltz premiered on television in the United States. [34]
• On November 10, 2001, the mailing list haremxf was created. [35]
• On November 10, 2005, twilightsrain created the LiveJournal community Pyre Flies.
• On November 10, 2005, the mailing list supernaturalfans was created. [36]
• Bandomcon, an online con for bandfic fans, ran from November 9 – 15, 2006.
• On November 10, 2006, Eclecticon 2006 had a panel for the general discussion of Gilmore Girls. [37]

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 9, 1998, Xena: Warrior Quarterback by L.Fox was published on FanFiction.Net. [30] It was the first Xena story published on the site.
• On November 9, 1998, the mailing list muldertorture was created. [31]
• On November 9, 2004, the LiveJournal community gilmoreimprov was created for Gilmore Girls improv fan fiction. [32]
• On November 9, 2006, the LiveJournal community torchwood_three was founded as a daily fandom newsletter that would link to News and Reviews, Episode Discussion, Meta Discussion, Fan Creations, and Events.
• Bandomcon, an online con for bandfic fans, ran from November 9 – 15, 2006.

• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.
• On November 9, 1999, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Wild At Heart premiered on television in the United States. [265]
• On November 9, 2006, the CSI episode Post Mortem originally aired in the United States. [237]
• On November 9, 1998, the mailing list muldertorture was created. [27]

• On November 9, 2006, the episode The Usual Suspects originally aired on CW in the United States. [106]

I love looking at Google Analytics.   I also love identifying fandom trends and trends on Fan History Wiki.  The following charts show traffic to articles which have those keywords in the URL. 

Different issues, sites and fandoms peaked at different times.  Draco/Hermione peaked in July 2009.  Cassandra Claire related articles peaked in August 2009.  That peak related to the news about her movie.  Our overall traffic to articles related to her has been down since 2007 as the SEO on our articles has fallen a bit; other articles about her rank much higher on Google. The Police also peaked in July 2009.  Michael Jackson related articles also peaked in July 2009. That was while a lot of the hoopla around his death was still going on. Jon and Kate Plus 8 peaked in June 2009.  That was around the time they announced their split and the topic just would not go away.  Pages with Fail in the url peaked in August 2009.  Most of the pages involved there were connected to Survey Fail as we were one of the best fandom news sources covering the issue.  Naruto also peaked in July.   AdultFanFiction.Net peaked in June 2009.  Freedom of Speech Fan Fiction Archive peaked in August 2009 as the site experienced continual downtime.  Inuyasha peaked in July 2009 as we added a number of articles about pieces of Inuyasha fan fiction. Sakura Lemon Fan Fiction Archive peaked in February 2009.  Traffic has been going down ever since.  Russet Noon peaked in March 2009.  Twilight peaked in February 2009.   Interest in Geocities peaked in October as the site was shutting down.   Interest in FanLib peaked in August, a year after it shut down.  Interest in Jorja Fox peaked in February 2009 thought there was much more consistent interested in September 2009.  LiveJournal peaked in February 2009.  Star Trek peaked in May 2009.  Harry Potter peaked in August.  Dreamwidth peaked in April.

I read McNiche: On the perils of scaling down a mass model a day or two ago and it has been bothering me ever since.

There was an observation or two about WikiCity that made me really think about Fan History and some of our automated content creation:

How many of those millions of “Web site pages” do you think was ever touched by a real person? And how many will ever be seen by a single person?

About 700,000 of Fan History’s 808,000 articles were created using automated methods that didn’t have a Fan History admin manually curating information.  We did this for FanFiction.Net people articles, for episode articles, for musician/band related articles.  I’d guess that of those 700,000 articles created by bots, roughly 50,000 have been touched by human hands.

Last month, there were 37,272 pages were viewed a total of 176,272 times.   That 37,272 works out to roughly 4% of our pages being accessed in October 2009.  Year to date, 183,755 pages were viewed a total of 1,786,830 times.  This works out to 22% of all our articles being accessed this year.  (Which basically supposes that only articles on the main name space were accessed.)  That doesn’t feel all that impressive.  We’d really, really like to improve on that.  It is one of our goals.  That and to get more people to edit pages that were created through automation.

The article talks about how scaling down these projects might be the best option because of all those dead pages that aren’t touched by human hands.  I’m just not sure for some large scale wiki projects that rely on automation like Fan History or AboutUs would benefit from this sort of thinking.  One of the things we’ve found on Fan History is that by having a large number of consistently formatted articles about certain topics is that we’ve been able to increase our number of contributors and have been able to get people to edit those articles.  It also helps with modeling; new contributors are able to look at those articles and create ones of their own.  We see this happen on a daily basis on Fan History: People discover articles about themselves or groups they are involved with and improve an article.  The article gets curated.  After that happens, the person doing it frequently links to it, tells others about it and then their friends go and create articles about their interests OR edit existing articles.  With out that automation, that wouldn’t happen.  If we were better at self promoting, our particular situation would improve and we’d have more people editing and curating and reporting and documenting.  The problem isn’t the automation; the problem is our ability to get others involved.

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 8, 1996, the Tomb Raider video game was released in the United States. [26][27]
• On November 8, 2001, the mailing list Doggett_Torture was created. [28]

• On November 8, 2005, the episode Bugs originally aired on CW in the United States. [104]
• On November 8, 2007, the episode Red Sky at Morning originally aired on CW in the United States. [105]

• On November 8, 2001, the CSI episode Caged originally aired in the United States. [235]
• On November 8, 2007, the CSI episode Who & What (1) originally aired in the United States. [236]

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 7, 1998, Ghost by Kielle became the first X-Men story published on FanFiction.Net. [20]
• On November 7, 1998, the Due South episode Good for the Soul originally aired on via TNT. [21]
• On November 7, 2002, the LiveJournal community hprpdarkside was created. [22]
• On November 7, 2003, The Janeway/Chakotay Story Index was last updated. [23]
• On November 7, 2005, The Walt Disney Company releases the Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers Volume 1 DVD set.
• On November 7, 2005, the LiveJournal Andromeda community beka_writers was created. [24]
• Anik LaChev announced that updates for Campus would eventually come on November 7, 2006. [25]
• Gears of War was released for X-Box 360 on November 7, 2006. People tried to kill each other for copies when it came out, and people wanked about the ending music.
• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.
• On November 7, 2000, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Family premiered on television in the United States. [264]

• On November 7, 2002, the CSI episode The Execution of Catherine Willows originally aired in the United States. [234]

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:

1. 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.
2. Strive to tell a cohesive narrative. In quickly evolving events, it is crucial to understand how and when things evolved.
3. Be organized. Compiling a link list is often the best way to begin.

News sources

Sometimes you can stumble upon fandom news on your own. You may run across an event that needs covering on your Twitter feed, on your LiveJournal (or its clones) friends list, reading your favorite blogs or as a blow up happens on your favorite mailing list, message board, fansite or archive. If news is not obvious or you don’t know where to go to get, there are several places you can to find news to cover. Sites that are favorites of Fan History’s admins to check for news include:

• Dreamwidth Studios
  • lol meme
  • linkspam
• Fandom blogs
  • Henry Jenkins
  • Online Fandom
  • Convention Fans Today
• InsaneJournal
  • deutschesfandom
  • espanolfandom
  • meta_roundup
  • metametameta
• JournalFen
  • fandom_wank
  • fandom_lounge
  • the hms stfu
  • unfunnybusiness
  • wank report
• LiveJournal:
  • fandom_lawyers
  • fandomsecrets
  • fanthropology
  • metafandom
  • ohnotheydidnt
  • sf_drama
  • stop_plagiarism
• Tech blogs
  • Mashable
  • ReadWriteWeb
  • TechCrunch

This list currently over represents with LiveJournal media fandom because admins are a bit biased in that direction and this type of news is the kind that we get the most incoming visitors from. You can find other sources for fandom news. Please check Help:Be a Fan History Reporter/News sources by fandom for links to those sources. When documenting the history of an event, you don’t need to focus on fandoms and communities that fall under the purview of the communities covered just by those links.

Naming the situation

In many cases, small kerfluffles can be worked into an existing article. If the news is about a convention, the reporting can go on the page about that convention. This is how the situation was handled for TwiCon. Sometimes though, fandom news needs to go on its own article. The general rule of thumb is that if the link list in reporting a situation is more than ten links AND/OR the kerfluffle section would be longer than a third of the length of the article AND/OR the kerfluffle involves a large audience beyond the original intended one, a new article about the situation should be created.

Once you’ve determined that a new article is needed, how do you create a name for it? First, read a bit about the situation. In many cases, participants will have already coined a phrase to describe a situation. This was the case for SurveyFail and Race Fail 2009. If no one has coined a name for the situation you are reporting on, then you are free to name it yourself. The name should reflect what is going on. If there is a particularly influential post with a title that gives an idea of what is going on, you can borrow that. Otherwise if the situation is a fail one, it should include Fail in the title. If the situation is a kerfluffle/kerfuffle, it should include that in the title. If it is a wank, Wank should appear in the title. If it is none of those, chose some other short phrase to describe the situation. This was done for a situation involving Eli Roth that was named Eli Roth saga of doom. After you have chosen the descriptor, couple that before or after the main focus of the topic you are reporting on. Examples of names of topics cover that you can model naming after:

• Eli Roth saga of doom
• Fishboob Fail 09
• LambdaFail
• Race wank
• Trans Fail
• The War on Science Fiction
• Wiscon 33 Gender Kerfluffle

When thinking of a name, do not worry too much about it. It is easy to move an article or use redirects to point to that article if other names for a situation develop. It is a wiki and the article name being less than ideal is not going to matter. If you later have regrets about what you named an article, just comment on a talk page to ask for people’s opinions on what to rename it.

Links list

The heart of most of Fan History’s fandom news related articles is the link lists. These are easy to build and do not require extensive knowledge of a situation. Often, they are one of the first things that reporters write and they are a good place to start. If you do not have a good grasp of a situation, or the situation is developing quickly, we recommend that you start your reporting by compiling a link list. In some cases, this is all

Examples of articles with link lists that you can model your own article after include:

• Race Fail 2009
• SurveyFail

Link lists should be organized by date and author. The purpose of providing two versions of one list of urls is to make it easier for people to find content, and to prevent bias in how links are organized. Sorting by date also helps construct the narrative of the events for readers of the article and for other reporters trying to document the event. Sorting by author helps to identify key participants in events and makes it easy integrate those links in articles about members of fandom.

Links on the list you create should be formatted like this:

* [http://link Link title or blog post title)]: [[author]] on [[Month day]], [[year]]

This provides consisting formatting across other news stories and makes it easy to include parts of the list on other page while providing additional context.

Documenting an event

When documenting a situation, there are three goals: accurately portray what happened in a neutral fashion, provide a cohesive narrative and preserving the history of an event.

There are several tricks to writing in a neutral fashion. One way is to try to provide relevant quotes from all sides; do not just quote one side. Second, try to seek out links that represent multiple points of view. For example, in a situation like FanLib, you would want to provide quotes from FanLib, FanLib supporters and FanLib detractors. You would want to link to all of those with out placing a value judgement on the links.

Sometimes, it appears like people are overwhelmingly supporting one side and it makes it impossible to provide a neutral perspective. In these cases, the best way to handle things neutrally is to identify quotes from the minority that the majority has identified as the most problematic. Use these quotes so that people can see them in their original with out the commentary. Provide links back to that material. Include links to commentary about those quotes in the link section. Handling things in this fashion helps to accurately represent the minority view and highlights complaints of the majority.

One of the ways to provide a cohesive narrative is to create a timeline of events. When you are first starting to write the article, you may want to use a standard Fan History style timeline with bullets stating that an event occurred on this site on this date with relevant citations. As you improve the timeline, take each of those bulleted points and expand on it by providing relevant quotes and screencaps. Provide additional context to those events, like what something happened in response to or why this event is worth including in the report. If you begin to feel overwhelmed, comment on the talk page to ask for assistance.

Preserving history is important as some links disappear, people will make posts private or delete comments. When you suspect that content may disappear, screencap the conversation and upload the screencap to Fan History. Put the image in the relevant category or create a new one for this event if there are multiple images. If you are unsure how to do this, leave a comment on the talk page for the image and ask an administrator for help in figuring this out.

In some cases, it is important that the text be more easily searchable. If that is case, you can create a page with the name of the post, put {{preserving history}} at the top and ask an administrator to lock this article as a historical document. This type of history preservation is useful for documents like Terms of Services when people may want to compare different versions.

One of the things that we ask at Fan History is that if you are reporting on a story that you do not drop in and comment to people that you linked to in order to inform them that you linked to them. In some cases, such as situations like Race Fail 2009, this could lead to derailing of important conversations. Some of the topics that you may cover are important and derailing would be unfortunate. You are free to post links elsewhere, pointing people to the article as a resource but we ask that reporters for a topic do not drop links. This is similar to the policy at fandom wank of asking users not to “troll” the wank.

Another thing that we ask is that as you report on event, remember to follow Fan History’s rules. Some important rules to remember:

• Do not reveal private information in an article. If during the course of reporting an event, some one does this and you think it is important to cover, explain what happened with out providing the private information. Link to the source that provides that information you are providing.
• Do not use profanity unless you’re quoting some one else and only then, if the profanity helps with documenting the evtn.
• Do cite sources as often as possible and assume good faith on the part of other reporters.
• Do not write in the first person. If you are involved in an event, you can get around this by labeling a section {{MPOV}} and giving your account of the events.

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• On November 6, 1996, Wicked by Gregory Maguire was published in the United States.
• On November 6, 2004, the LiveJournal community oc_greatness was created. [17]
• On November 6, 2004, the LiveJournal community warrior_women was founded. It was dedicated to Xena. [18]
• On November 6, 2006, the mailing list saracalleigh was created for the posting of CSI, CSI: Miami pairing of Sara/Calleigh fan fiction. [19]
• On November 6, 2006, Across this Table by cs272 was the first A Tree Grows In Brooklyn story posted on FanFiction.Net.

• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.
• On November 6, 2001, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Once More, With Feeling premiered on television in the United States. [263]
• On November 6, 2003, the CSI episode Jackpot originally aired in the United States. [232]

The following is a selection of some events that took place on fandom on this day:

• Wraithbait was created on November 5, 2004. [14]
• On November 5, 2005, the Idlewood LiveJournal community idlewild_fans was created. [15]
• The first public LiveJournal posting by Eighth-Horizon was November 5, 2005 with a posting of Journey fic.
• On November 5, 2006, the LiveJournal community jrock_ideas was created for discussion of JRock. [16] Fandoms represented by this community include Dir en grey, and Gackt.

• During November 2008, zazzle.com received a cease and desist letter requesting the site remove the Twilight material on their site.

• On November 5, 2002, the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episode Him premiered on television in the United States. [262]

This is an extract from our Yuletide article that includes a bit of fandom news for those participating…

• On November 4, 2009, sign-ups for the 2009 exchange went live.[6] In an announcement earlier in the day, it was finally revealed, as had been hinted at previously, that Yuletide would be integrating into Archive of Our Own for the posting and revealing of stories this year. It was also suggested by this announcement that the old Yuletide archive would be merged into AO3.[7] When questioned on how the Yuletide admins would handle deletion requests from previous authors who did not wish their work to be hosted on AO3, the response given was:

….participation in Yuletide comes with an agreement that authors will leave their stories in the Yuletide archive. If we’d had to move to a new ISP, I’d have assumed that this agreement held good.

This is essentially what is happening with the shift to AO3, a move that is necessary for Yuletide to continue at all, and definitely the best option for the mods and the ongoing existence of the Yuletide archive. The Challenge will still be maintained and run by astolat and myself; how distinct the Yuletide archive will be in appearance and search options is not yet completely defined.

With the shift, and going by overall AO3 policy, people will be able to delete their own stories, but we will ask that instead they “orphan” them, which will be an easy option. If they instead choose to delete the stories, they will no longer be welcome to sign up for Yuletide, since they will be removing what was essentially someone else’s gift, as you say.[8]

If anyone needs context for this particular event, the two are run by the same people.  One argument that is running in defense of this that this is no different than importing LiveJournal comments to Dreamwidth Studios.

If you haven’t seen it, read Cory Doctorow’s Secret copyright treaty leaks. It’s bad. Very bad. It spells out some of the details of proposed international copyright law that the Obama administration is looking to change the world with.

If this changed happened, it would be bad news for fans and their families. It looks like it would also squash a lot of fair use rights that fans rely on for things like fanvidding and fan fiction archives. For fan fiction archivists, there is always the question of “Is this material legal?” For the most part, archivists just ignore this question and only deal with the issue when legal threats are issued. There is no precedent for the material so we just don’t know. If archivists are going to be held liable for user uploaded material, then there will be an incentive to close archives. Why? Most archivists run their archives as a labor of love and cannot afford to the liability.

Fansites are in the same spot. Most of those are also labors of love that rely on their promotional aspects and fair use to rely on what they host or allow contributors to their site to upload.

There are so many other issues with this and how it is bad news for the fan community that I can’t fully articulate them. This is not change we can believe in. Let the US government know that this is not good and is not necessary for national security, that our current implementation of this has been a total failure and unAmerican in that it does not allow due process.

… admit no mistake, do not make yourself vulnerable to others, always be on the offensive, don’t admit to character flaws or weakness. We are taught that if you do, you will suffer the consequences for years. We are taught, through example, that if you admit mistakes and are vulnerable, others will exploit these weakness for their own fannish benefit.

I’m writing this entry mostly in response to a series of tweets by Ben Parr, a writer for Mashable. Our perspectives differ because of our place online and our own experiences. I’d love to believe “@BenParr @purplepopple My philosophy has always been “let the haters come,” because I believe in what I do and prove it with my actions.” I believe in what I’m doing. I believe in it a lot. I’m committed to what I’m doing and am always looking for ways to improve. I just do not like to publicly own my faults because I just have moments when I can’t because I’ve seen what fandom haters are capable of. I don’t just don’t have the energy to deal with the ramifications of the shit that could come down the pike if some hater took issue with me.

Check out some of the shit that Cassandra Clare, Supernatural fans, Smallville fans, Blake’s 7 fans, X-Files fans and science fiction fans are capable of. Contacting employers, contacting family, threatening to kill people and talking about how they deserve to be sexually assaulted, cracking passwords, contacting webhosts to report them for alleged Terms of Service Violations, contacting a show’s producers and actors to blast them for another set of fans’s actions. Most of the most egregious behavior doesn’t get documented out of fear of both sides going after the document-er for getting the story wrong.

I want to characterize these actions as fail fandom but it isn’t. Fail fandom is generally about some one taking offensive at something some one did or said or implied. Sure, yeah, the subtext of fail fandom is often about a power play in fandom but at the onset, it generally doesn’t look that way.

A lot of this is really banal stuff. Do you ship Clark/Chloe? Well fuck you. I hate your ship with a fiery passion. You’re in my space. Let me find some ways to cause you pain. Hey! You wrote Supernatural incest fic? I hate that crap! I know what to do! You made the mistake of linking your real name and your fannish name so I’ll contact your family and let them know what you are up to online! Oh hey! You challenged my status in the Harry Potter fandom and I need my status to be higher so I can be closer to JK Rowling. Let me teach you a lesson, because I know you work in school, by letting them know what sort of material you read. It doesn’t matter that I read it too because I don’t work with kids. You like Doggett from X-Files? That’s unforgivable because MSR is the only good thing from X-Files and because you’re too stupid to get that, I’ll just do a DDoS on your network connection. I want the freedom to write sexually graphic rape because of artistic freedom. You don’t like that and hey you’re a rape victim? Awesome! Because you know how you tried to repress my artistic expression? I’m going to intentionally trigger you! Those examples are all variations of real incidents.

And then we come back to the first part of this post: Media fandom on LiveJournal (and its clones like Dreamwidth Studios)teaches us not to be vulnerable, to self criticize, to admit to our weaknesses. In some places, in some communities, you want to admit and own your weakness, your vulnerabilities and where you can improve. I’ve found that in the wiki community outside Wikipedia, this generally is the norm. On Twitter and in social media communities filled with social media professionals, it is also good to be able articulate those. Fandom differs to a degree though. In a wiki, we should all be working towards a greater good. In social media, you want to be honest with your clients, to be continually learning and you’re aware of the professional repercussions for being an asshole, and a moron that engages in personal attacks on people outside of the scope of the content. Fandom doesn’t have those considerations of greater good or professional gain.

Fandom has other considerations because, for most of us, fandom is a hobby. People have goals for fandom: Having fun, getting feedback on their stories, enjoying the porn, being fawned over for their most awesome fanvids and fanart, writing extensive meta analysis because they love to do that, to fantasize about Eli Roth getting off on your nudie pics, trying to get a professional publishing career, using their fanac as a vehicle to meet actors and producers, trying to influence the writers and directors and actors to write the book or show like they want it to be written. Some of these inherently set fans into conflict with each other. If you are in a fandom to get close to the powers that be, well only so many people can. If you are in a fandom because of a character, actor or ship, there is only so much time that those can be given; people with different preferences are going to be in conflict as they try to persuade producers to focus on their desires. For fan fiction writers and readers and vid watchers, there is only so much time in a day, only so much feedback that can be given; conflict happens in the struggle to maximize the feedback and to support our favorite artists. The greater good in fandom only seems to happen when there is something that threatens the institution around which the fandom is based like a show ending.

Because of fandom existing as a state of conflict, because LiveJournal fandom is dominated by women, people bring in the personal and unrelated. The attacker looks for vulnerabilities. They look for places where they can exploit your weakness in order to push you out of fandom, to get you to stop being in conflict with them and to further their own agenda.

That’s my takeaway from fandom. Those are the lessons I have learned. So while I think it is good to be able to articulate your weakness in social media, as a journalist, as a historian, as an entrepreneur, I have trouble with that because I cannot unlearn overnight what I spent over ten years learning and having reinforced on a daily basis. (Thanks White Collar fandom and Smallville fandom for this week’s lesson.)

I’ve been busy in the past two days being a big hockey fan, having seen the Chicago Blaze and the Rockford Ice Hogs play. The Chicago Blaze are an AAHL team. They play in Rolling Meadows. Home games cost $8. Parking is free. Food is cheap. The hockey is entertaining and the team is undefeated.

I didn’t have my normal camera so I was stuck taking pictures on my cell phone on Friday night. Those pictures can be found here at Chicago Blaze images. If you have your own images, please feel free to upload them.

On Halloween, I went the 50 miles to Rockford, Illinois to see the Rockford Ice Hogs play. I’d been to a Chicago Wolves game before and had loads of fun there. The Ice Hogs are the Chicago Blackhawks farm team and get a lot, lot of promotion on WZOK, a Rockford radio station I listen to a lot. I decided at 5:50pm to see them with a start time at 7:05. Eek. The parking was more affordable than the Wolves: $5 vs. $11. I got a ticket for $12 behind the goal on the second level. Second level seats seem a bit better (Metro Center) than they do at Wolves games. (Allstate Arena) I didn’t buy any food so I can’t really compare. It was a lot of fun. The fans at this game chanted and cheered and talked to other fans. I was amused by the cheering when the Ice Hogs scored. The cheer? “Hey, guess what? Your goalie sucks!” This chanting went on for a while. Some one also had bubbles blowing. The hockey players seemed a bit more intense, quicker to get on and off the ice than the Chicago Blaze. The hits were harder. Awesome fun. I’d go see them play again. (Though I might see the Wolves first as they have better entertainment during the game.) Oh and hey! Free wifi inside the Metro Center.

Again, no camera but had my cell phone camera. My pictures are at Rockford Ice Hogs images.

I love hockey. I love the game experience for the AAHL and the AHL. I just never want to hear how rude Chicago Cubs fans are again. Anyone who says that? They haven’t attended a hockey game, where rudeness has been ritualized and is good fun.

This week I did a conference call with wikiHow. All users were invited to attend and the call was advertised on wikiHow’s forums and in their chat room. I like these things a lot. (I just felt a bit uncomfortable “attending” as I am not an active contributor. I mostly hang out on chat and edit when asked. I’m there for great wiki community support and because I believe in their project.) It is interesting to hear part of their call and to get insight into their thought process for implementing features and design. I don’t get to do as much of that with Fan History because we lack the technical skills. The parts that I participated in talked about things like placement of how to contribute on their main page, how to offer live support, if their current chat room is an effective option, how to advertise that. There was also some mention of the new skin. If you’re a contributor to wikiHow, or want to see how a large wiki works, try to get in on another one of their calls.

Most popular articles for October 2009. (Yes, two days early but I want it done because plans for the weekend.) Some patterns have changed from a year ago but mostly, what has always been popular continues to be popular.

1. Draco/Hermione
2. Sakura Lemon Fan-Fiction Archive
3. Shotacon
4. AdultFanFiction.Net
5. Yu-Gi-Oh Card Maker Wiki
6. Cassandra Claire
7. FanFiction.Net
8. FanDomination.Net
9. Naruto
10. Fan fiction archives

For the month, we had 36,101 pages that were viewed a total of 167,509 times.

Through the years, many individuals and companies have been come face to face with cease and desist orders over copyright infringement. Zazzle, a type of CafePress website for users to be able to create their own designs and sell them on various bobbles and clothing was sued by Summit Entertainment for selling Twilight swag.

Courthouse news mentions it in their article Moviemakers Sue Site Over ‘Twilight’ Swag

Though the main event this Halloween season seems to be Ms Marmite Lover.

Then Warner Bros sent their own ceast and desist letter to a blogger by the name of Ms Marmite Lover who wanted to have a Harry Potty Dinner in her home for the cost of recooping the fees of the meal. She has placed the ordeal on her site and changed the name of her party, but still drew up drama to try to get support for her idea. Her blog entry, Generic Wizard night illustrates the issue, but also boiled over to Guardian.co.uk in her article – Harry Potter and the chamber of lawyers. It was even mentioned in the BritishBlogs.co.uk site in the article Muggle lawyers ban Harry Potter feast

Some of the commenters tried to tell her through her site and the Gaurdian site that if her feast had been not for profit, it would have been no problem and there was no reason to pitch a fit to the public if she changed the name already. Yes, even if it might sound ridiculous, it is unfortunate that society has come to horde anything in the name of money.

Some reactions to Ms Marmite Lover and the Case of Copyright Infringement:

‘Screw You, Mrs Marmite Lover’
Warner Bros. to fan: No Harry Potter dinners for you!
Harry Potter themed dinner banned for ‘infringing copyright’
Harry Potter dinner disappears

You might have to wonder if Halloween just might end up ruined with all the greed amok…

written by Nile Flores (@blondishnet on Twitter)

We’ve received several visits to Fan History from people looking for information about Michael Jackson content that was archived on Geocities. We have a fair bit. It can be found in the following locations:

• Michael Jackson stories (info on 18 stories archived on Geocities)
• Michael Jackson fansites on Geocities (info on 7 sites. More to be added as we process our data.)
• Michael Jackson images (screencaps of several fansites hosted on Geocities. Some have not been made into articles yet.)

If you know of any Michael Jackson specific efforts to save info on Geocities, let us know!

Like most people, we’ve been pretty busy doing things in life that need to get done.  We worked really hard to get some Geocities preservation work done.  The site closes down tomorrow.  We’re not happy with what we got preserved, even as we are.  Doubled edged sword that.

We did a manual look through and found information on about 5,000 stories archived on Geocities.  We screencapped and created articles about over 500 sites.  We added definitions from around 50 pages on Geocities.  In the final days, we created an extension so that people could look at the page and fill out the form, updating wiki articles about the site.

And in the past five days, we really kicked it into over drive.  We extracted information about 9,000 fansites mentioned on DMOZ.  We screencapped about 5,000 of those pages which contain related meta data.  We screencapped another 500 or so pages based on Google search results.  We downloaded about 1,000 text files related to fandom.  We saved about 10,000 search results from Google that mentioned fandom related terms on pages hosted on Geocities.  Some of this information is just garbage.  Early SEO efforts used random keyword seeding on the bottom of pages and that still pulls up on search, especially 500 deep.  Some of the screencaps are undoubtedly 505 errors.  Others, especially ones based on Google searches, are probably not fandom related.  Lots and lots of potential garbage sorted in with potentially useful information.

The problem now is: What do we do with this data?  The screencaps, the google search results, the DMOZ information?  How do we sort through it, cull through it, put it on the wiki?  Do we just mass upload everything and sort the potential garbage out later?  Do we just slowly try to work out things now?

We’re looking for ideas on how to handle that.  We’re also looking for assistance in implementing any ideas.  Any help you can provide us with post Geocities closing is most welcome.

I love the people who help make Fan History awesome with their work. Some of our back end work is done by non-fandom people who come from the wiki community who see the value of our work. One of those people is Lewis Collard. He did a fair amount of automated screencapping that we need to get uploaded on Fan History.

He’s written about doing this and has a fair number of screencaps over on his blog. It is a really great entry and well worth reading. It nicely summarizes some of the major html trends from those early days. Go and check it out.

Well apparently the Twitter world is laughing at the hoax about Kanye West kicking the bucket in a car accident. This may have been done in response to a video by Spike Jonze which depicts the entertainer being killed in a car accident. Since this, the video has been pulled.

Since then, Twitter fluttered about with the trending topic RIP Kanye West, it has remained in the top list for more than 24 hours. Some tweeps jokes that the incident about the Balloon Boy was a better hoax. In fact, it only became a hoax after West’s girlfriend Amber Rose set the record straight, and even Los Angeles Times covered it in their article -
Amber Rose ( @DaRealAmberRose ) debunks ‘RIP Kanye West’ Twitter topic. On Idolator, they still have a screenshot of the photoshopped piece in their article Kanye West: Not Dead that says “Rapper West Dead at 32.”

So, anyone laughing? Kanye is not and apparently has not even acknowledge the hoax as nothing has been said as of yet. The only thing is that the Balloon Boy incident has been doing better as the RIP Kanye West trending topic is finally filtering itself out of popularity.

“Whoever started the RIP Kanye West hoax…Imma let you finish, but Balloon Boy had the best hoax of all time.”

- Pulled from trending topic Balloon Boy on Twitter.

Are there going to be anymore incidents with Kanye in the near future to surprise the media and fans? He already has been called a “jackass” by President Obama after his drunken interruption toward Taylor Swift’s VMA’s in September 2009.

How are minor league teams leveraging social media?  This is my perception of that and is based on an e-mail I wrote.  It has been altered slightly to make it more a blog post.

From the teams I am familiar with, as a fan and having talked to some people involved with local teams, the emphasis when it comes to online presence is e-mail marketing.  They get people to subscribe to their announcement lists when they buy tickets online, do post game follow ups with people who attended to ask them to attend another game or survey their experience at the game.  That’s really good with soliciting feedback, and getting people who just saw a game to commit seeing another one.

When it comes to e-mail marketing, some teams are more successful than others.  Not all are as compliant as they could be in regards to US laws regarding CAN-SPAM.  One team does not make their e-mails that viewable for people who don’t view images with e-mail; their e-mail announcements to subscribers contain just one big image.

Many teams use Twitter.  The Chicago Red Stars, a local Chicago team in the women’s professional soccer league, live tweet their games.  They also @ reply to people who mention them, often mentioning deals on ticket packs.  Other teams are doing similar strategies with Twitter.  The teams with a better, comprehensive social media strategy are duplicating or promoting the content from their other online presences on Twitter: They link to YouTube, Facebook, what their players are doing in the blogosphere, encouraging people to follow players.

Teams use YouTube to brand themselves.  They have their own channels where there are interviews with players, clips from games, clips from television coverage of their team, commercials for the team, advertisements for team apparel, etc. The teams most successfully leveraging this space are ones that have detailed descriptions on their videos with keywords that will attract a wider audience.  (YouTube is the second or third largest search engine out there in terms of volume of search.)

Facebook Fan Pages are also a popular tool used by teams.  They have some content duplication with Twitter and Facebook but other content too.   They mention training camps, opportunities to meet with the team during the off season, information on player signing.  They talk about what players are doing during the off season, like playing for the national team or training/playing with other clubs.  They might give health updates.  They mention changes in the front office and other news around the league.  They link to blog posts that

Teams are still using MySpace.  (Facebook hasn’t killed it and the demographics for the site are different for both the US and Australia.  It is the 13th most popular site in Australia.)  Most of the updates that teams do are blog entries.  Some of these are press releases.  They are also using the space to upload videos and photos, sharing the same content from Facebook and YouTube.  The better teams are making sure there is some original content on each network they use.

Some minor league teams are also creating, or their fans create, a presence on LinkedIn in order to network.  The level of activity on these networks tends to be smaller.  The goal is to allow fans to network.   These groups tend to be smaller.

Those five networks, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, tend to be where most teams place an emphasis.  It makes sense as these are the most main stream places to capitalize on the largest audience.  People on those sites, with the exception of LinkedIn, tend to expect that there will be a presence for those teams.  There are several networks that aren’t being leveraged that teams should consider and that they may not because most social media people define those places as the Internet and stop. These networks include Flickr, LiveJournal, bebo, Ning, orkut and tagged.com.  Each has advantages that an online presence can help.

The teams that are most successful in using those networks are ones there they have the same style of writing across all their networks: Professional and friendly.  Teams that are successfully using social media to attract and keep an audience that they want to convert into regular attendees to matches also brand their logos and colors consistently across the different platforms they use.  If they can’t use their own background, like the case for Facebook and LinkedIn, the accounts have their own logos showing for all posts they make and wherever else they can brand.  Teams successfully using social media are also updating regularly, even during the off season.  There is generally new content on all their networks at least once a week, if not more.  Those three things are important: Consistent writing style, consistent branding and regular updates.

Before I go further with this post, I want to publicly apologize to Fan History’s awesome tech guy, emufarmers. Through my own actions, I dragged him into this little drama. I wish I hadn’t as I respect him more than that.

James Mitchell and Juris Informatica is looking to hire a Mediawiki Administrator. I found out about this when Elizabeth Peterson contacted me on LinkedIn about this position, asked me if I might be interested in the position, and if I could e-mail answers to those questions to them. Parts of the section above those questions set off alarm bells, like being paid on commission but this type of job is not a paid on commission one. Because I wanted that sort of professional experience, I applied. I got called back with in about 10 minutes, before I even got an e-mail.

Weird. But whatever. I’ve had that sort of contact for a job interview before.

The guy who called me was not Elizabeth Peterson. It was James Mitchell. He wanted some one who had a bit more tech side. I’d thought, based on my resume, my LinkedIn profile, that it was pretty obvious that I didn’t have that and that from the personal LinkedIn solicitation, they would have known this already. Nope. Not true.

Whatever though. He wanted to know who I worked with at Fan History to do our tech stuff. I told him who. It was indicated to me that he would only work with me if my tech guy was on board to do work, so I gave him that information so he could contact my most awesome tech guy. (Rude on my part. Sorry emufarmers.)

I then got in touch with my awesome tech guy and a few professional acquaintances. One of them pointed out that WOW! Mr. James Mitchell, the guy who runs a legal website, asked an illegal hiring question: Am I married? Do I have children?

Another pointed out that the guy talked about working on commission based on getting leads for lawyers where they win a settlement. (Read: Work for free for a long time on some one’s site, where the pay out might not be for two years if the case goes quickly. Get zilch in the mean time because your time isn’t realy worth anything.) And he wants you to be independent finacially… while he’s busy not paying you:

Entrepreneurial Mindset. Obviously anyone who joins us has to be somewhat entrepreneurial, in that they receive a cut of revenues. We look for people that realize that even when you sell your time for $75 or $150 an hour, you are still a slave to the clock and you are never going to make serious money. We want people who are financially ambitious, who are looking to retire five years from now, and realize that by obtaining equity in highly profitable Web sites, one can reasonably soon end the tyranny of working for clients.

Financial Resources. They can afford an entrepreneurial work situation, both financially and psychologically — i.e. they can afford to work without a salary and instead receive a percentage of the profits of the Web sites they participate in. Our partners need to have some level of financial stability in their lives. Our approach involves some level of delayed gratification in exchange of extraordinary wealth down the road. (Note — Our partners do not invest any money, as the Firm pays all expenses. They do invest their time.)

If this was a sales job, cool! But the indication was that this was for content development. (Which is in itself a form of sales, but a different type of sales. And most sites I know that sell based on traffic you generate for them don’t pay off 1, 2, 5 or even 10 years down the road.)

All flags but I talked with Fan History’s tech guy and the working professionals I knew. I figured I could stomach the illegal hiring question issue, the reads like an arrogant ass… if he would be flexible enough to pay me a base salary based on time instead of that. If he is so sure that this is going to make millions, if he really needs my expertise, then it would be doable.

Except when he called me back, the first thing he did was insult my team member. Sorry. No. “I want you to do business with me. I want you to work for me. So you know what? I’m going to insult the people you do business with, and put them down.” Because that is how professionals work and how they get business.

He went through his spiel while I patiently listened. He’s going to scrape Wikipedia. He can do this legally he informed me. No one is really going to notice that he did that. They’ll just go ga ga over his content and because they are non-college educated people (because they are the ones with the biggest legal problems who are going to use the Internet and too stupid to realize that his content is Wikipedia duplicate content), they will be more likely to go with one of his lawyer leads as a result.

Which ignores the fact that Google doesn’t like duplicate content, punishes some scrapes like that, etc. It also engenders ill will from the wider wiki community. It slaps at your own credibility because you can’t create that type of content.

The conversation went on about how easy it was to automatically create content like that. Awesomeness. Then he told me how he happened to contact me: He or some one he hired built a bot to scrape all the members of the groups that mentioned Mediawiki on LinkedIn. Then an account was set up to automatically contact all those people to let them know about the job, using personalization to make it seem as if a person contacted them. It sounded like he was saying thatElizabeth Peterson didn’t actually exist. Special. That sort of usage of LinkedIn activity sounds kind of unethical and black hat. I like my SEO and other online activities to be white hat.

Did I mention that somewhere along the line he asked me about my personal life? My living situation? If I was married or if I was involved with some one? He repeatedly the illegal question that appeared on the application. He wants to make sure that you don’t have them so that when you’re taking a shower, his example, you will be thinking about your work and how you are going to make him and yourself a lot of money.

James Mitchell really wanted me to do content creation for him to generate leads. I’m passionate about many things but making money and generating content with that as the soul focus is not my passion. (And most of the books about start ups I’ve read talk about how successful ones are where people are passionate about what they do, not passionate about making money for the sake of making money.) I expressed to him that I was concerned that he would, you know, rip me off with payments. I would only work for salary. He assured me that he wouldn’t rip me off. I could trust him. Why? Because he needs me to make him money so he has no incentive to rip me off. (If I’m going to make you millions, why can’t you salary me? It is a sure thing for you and you can underpay me the value of those leads.)

Wrong answer dude. So let’s review the lessons on how to not hire a Mediawiki Administrator:

• Ask hiring questions that are illegal;
• Insult team members of the person you are hiring, persons that the person you are hiring thinks highly of;

• Ask the person to do work for you with the promise they will be paid for the leads they generate that could be, by your own admission, years down the line because of how the legal system works;

• Admit to ethically dubious behavior as part of your business plan;

• Tell some one that you have no incentive to rip you off because you need them to make you money.

The take away? Do not interview with James Mitchell.

The following is an extract from a conversation on ThoseinMedia on LinkedIn regarding the paper I wrote, MLB Game Attendance and Alternative Social Network Group Engagement.  I posted it here because it goes into a bit more depth with the analysis and thought it was interesting.

Comments (8)

1. David Berger

   Online marketing expert, e-strategy consultant

   Laura: This is interesting data, and it’s great to truly quantify that active fan bases continue to actively attend games.

   My main question for you, is what is the relevance of a social site that is predominantly used outside of the US? If a team wishes to engage in social strategies in order to hopefully boost attendance in Milwaukee, for example, engaging their audience further in Ireland is probably not the most cost effective thing they can do.

   My guess is further targeting is required in order to find best investment opportunities… a review of network activity by postal code should show even greater correlation around the home team’s immediate attendance zone.

   Posted 1 day ago | Reply Privately

2. 

   Dale Smith

   Managing Partner – Mixed Breed Media

   I think you are reaching for straws here!

   MLB attendance is a direct correlation to market size, local fan attraction and a winning team. I’m not sure Social networking sites play a role in any of that. Sure there is plenty of banter on these sites between fans, but unless the local team has some type of draw to get fans in the stands, Social media won’t help.

   The draw being a super star player on the team, or the visiting team or the team has plenty of check marks in the win column.

   Kansas City Royals have not had a winning team in over 20 years. Attendance shows it. In the mid to late 70’s through the mid 80’s the Royals were sold out. The difference was wins and star players.

   If you want to know why the Marlins, A’s and the Pirates have low attendance, take a look at their rosters and look at their record.

   Don’t try to make social networking into something it’s not.

   Posted 20 hours ago | Reply Privately

3. 

   Laura Hale

   Fan community specialist and wiki evangelist

   @David Berger

   Regarding non-US based social networks, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure of the relevance to attendance. I was interested to see if there was one nonetheless. (And there is for bebo and orkut which have large non-American populations.) The most useful information that came out of that had less to do with the quantitative data and was more the qualitative type observations. (Er. And quantitative when it come to another measure, like revenue and evaluation.) Brazil for instance is really into the Yankees and a few other teams for urban street wear. (Which, qualitatively, is useful for merchandising down there.) If you get brand identification and knowledge of your team like that, you can try to build around it to try to get those fans who might think about visiting the US to attend multiple games while they are visiting.

   Other leagues, especially European football ones, have an international fan contingent who visit. If the demographics of that community indicate some wealth to do that, then it can be more useful there.

   There are probably better ways to target but that data is something you would probably need to be a member of that team’s organization to have access to… and even then, I’m not sure you can plug that directly into a social network to do specific targeting.

   Posted 17 hours ago | Delete comment

4. 

   Laura Hale

   Fan community specialist and wiki evangelist

   @Dale Smith Grasping at straws or not, the relationship still exists. And it doesn’t necessarily explain differences inside the same market: The Dodgers and the Angels, the Mets and the Yankees, the Cubs and the White Sox are matched pairs with the same metro area to draw from. Yet their attendance is NOT the same. The size of the fan communities on social networks is not the same.

   Yes, there are a lot of variables at play here. It doesn’t necessarily play that one causes the other… but the relationship, for whatever reason, exists.

   Correlation between home attendance and record is. .689 which is pretty strong but you still get aberrant data points like the Mets who rank 7th for attendance but have a sub .500 record. Texas, Tampa Bay, Marlins are above .500 but their attendance is below average.

   And when you correlate social network size against winning percentage? The relationship is less than the one for average attendance… which doesn’t really support your theory. If it was true, the correlation between winning record and social community size would be stronger.

   Posted 17 hours ago | Delete comment

5. David Berger

   Online marketing expert, e-strategy consultant

   Laura: thanks for the follow up… the long way around your hypothesis is… “teams with large fan bases tend to correlate with higher attendance”, which I don’t think anyone will disagree with.

   The marketer’s experiments, with this information is to see if you can assess value from it. The Yankees for example, can take the large group on facebook and market for tickets with a geographic bias, or merchandise w/o a geographic bias.

   When a community like this is self identifying (people have stood up on their own and said, I am a Yankee Fan), it presents a fabulous opportunity for an organization to engage their fans in a way that feels less like marketing, and more like appreciation – while still attaining their goals.

   Posted 17 hours ago | Reply Privately

6. 

   Laura Hale

   Fan community specialist and wiki evangelist

   @Darren Ellis NASCAR may have the issue of the branding is much more central to NASCAR than it is to individual teams and drivers. I’d also guess that they have less international branding and merchandising like that of Formula One. You’d almost have to treat Formula One like NASCAR to see how it works as MLB has a lot of different factors.

   I know that NASCAR communities do exist on some of these networks as I’ve seen them. There are people out there who talk about the sexiness of the one female driver, women who write homoerotic stories featuring the drivers, people who make meme images based on drivers, people who make icons about drivers… It would almost make more sense to try a formula where you brand around drivers and teams than NASCAR on the whole because you get more room, can better identify niche audience, etc.

   Posted 16 hours ago | Delete comment

7. 

   Dale Smith

   Managing Partner – Mixed Breed Media

   Laura,
   many of the teams you used have had a history of poor attendance in comparison with their cross town counterpart. The teams that you say draw from the same market ie. White Sox & the Cubs. Since each teams conception in that city they have had 2 completely different fan demographics. If you look more into baseball history, (decades before the internet and some before television), you’ll find many of the same issues in attendance records. Don’t be so quick to conclude that the same city draws the same fan base. Same thing is true in NY, the same is True in LA.

   Before someone equates some fantasy correlation between social networking and sports franchise attendance, make sure you look at the complete history of the teams and MLB in general. What you are reaching at has been in play with many of these markets since conception. Since that is the case, what does social media have to do with it?

   If you are doing this study and you DO NOT know the differences in the psycho, and demographics between fans in multiple team markets, you should go grab some history books on major league baseball and learn why the Sox and the Cubs not only have different fans from the same city but also have different attendance records from the beginning of each clubs exsistance.

   Sox fans wouldn’t go see the cubs in a world series and visa versa. Mets fans could care less about the Yankees and in turn the Yankee fans pretend the Mets don’t exists. The Dodger fans think the Angels come from another planet. The Angel fans wouldn’t step foot inside Dodger Stadium. You need to do some homework before you attach social media of all things as a reason for a phenomenon.

   Just my thoughts from a Baseball history buff and Marketing expert.

   Posted 16 hours ago | Reply Privately

8. 

   Laura Hale

   Fan community specialist and wiki evangelist

   @Dale Smith The problem is if the argument is that the correlation is actually market size, then the argument fails when you look at matched sets for teams in the same city… which is what I understand you were putting forth. Historically doing worse doesn’t explain away the fact that teams in the same city don’t have the same audience size. (There are a whole bunch of other variables that account for that.) Yes, the Cubs and White Sox have different demographics. Not arguing that but if the Marlins and Royals are being explained away because of small market? Then same argument should hold. It doesn’t.

   “Before someone equates some fantasy correlation between social networking and sports ”

   Correlation does not equate with causation. There are plenty of independent variables at play here. I am not denying that this is true. I’m also not saying that one variable causes the others. I’m merely pointing out that correlation exists. (And that knowledge of social community size, location and demographics on those communities may be helpful.) I think you’re reading more into this analysis than intended.

   “Sox fans wouldn’t go see the cubs in a world series and visa versa. ”

   Do you have any data to support this conclusion? This statement feels largely unsubstantiated. (As a Cubs fan, I happily went to two Chicago White Sox play off games in 2008. I attended a White Sox game this year.) I’d love to have data that supports your observations.

   “You need to do some homework before you attach social media of all things as a reason for a phenomenon. ”

   I don’t understand this statement. I never implied that correlation implies causation, which is the only way I could see this statement as having validity. Correlation exists. I don’t know why correlation exists between attendance and the size of social networking community size. Variables that you suggested like market size and winning percentage don’t have as strong of a correlation. There is clearly something else at play.

   As a marketing expert, perhaps you can parse why you think this is true.

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:

GTL’s due South page
]]> http://blog.fanhistory.com/?feed=rss2&p=1007 0 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1005 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1005#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:40:34 +0000 Laura http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1005

I feel like it is that time again.  It is time to blog about Twitter.  If you don’t know, I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter.  I had as many as 325 people I followed before I culled it down to around 276.  I like to follow people on Twitter who share a common interest, share common geography, that I have met personally, that offer news I chose to opt in to, that I want to network with.  With the exception of a few news related accounts, I don’t follow people who aren’t likely to interact back with me.

I don’t mind following people who follow me.  I like a balance of follows to followers.  Too many follows and too few followers means likely spam bot is one reason.  I  also like people with fewer followers.  My general assumption is if you have too many followers, you’re just gaming for autofollowers, people to market your company or personal brand at, where you have zero interest in me personally.  My litmus test for following back people with 1,000+ followers is thus sending DMs to those folks and thanking them for the following and asking for an @ reply with why the followed me.  (And if they  don;t want to do that, it is easy enough to find out how to contact me.)  If you can’t do that, it is a clear sign of some one gaming for autofollowers.  The following is a list of people who failed to respond and thus are gaming for autofollowers:

• @returntweet
• @chatonic_room
• @veronica_starr
• @worldwidescam
• @606VIP
• @AM_Rotary_37067
• @chirpup
• @HowToKnowledge
• @followpower2
• @thepartyyy
• @goelias
• @sirgold
• @pramitjnathan
• @abetterresume

]]> http://blog.fanhistory.com/?feed=rss2&p=1005 0 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1004 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1004#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:11:16 +0000 Laura http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1004

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.

]]> http://blog.fanhistory.com/?feed=rss2&p=1004 1 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1003 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1003#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:04:43 +0000 Laura http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1003

IPBFree went down this morning and have been down for several hours. They host a number of fandom based message boards so this is problematic for fandom. We hope it gets back up.

]]> http://blog.fanhistory.com/?feed=rss2&p=1003 0 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1002 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1002#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:50:17 +0000 Laura http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1002

We’re still looking for help with our Geocities preservation project as it heads into its final days. One new tool we have to make it easier for you to contribute is Fanfox. It is a Firefox extension that loads as a sidebar tool. It has a list of urls, and the page title for that url. You click on the url in the upper left hand corner of the sidebar. In the main page space, the url loads. Look at the page, fill out the form in the sidebar and click submit! There. You’ve helped preserve the history of a page located on Geocities.

If you’re really interested, let us know and we’ll add a lot more urls. We just haven’t so far as we haven’t wanted to take time away from our other Geocities work.

]]> http://blog.fanhistory.com/?feed=rss2&p=1002 0 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1001 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1001#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:10:34 +0000 Laura http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1001

Well, it looks as though science fiction fandom is about ready to engage in another major round of Fail.

This time it’s a fresh batch of sexuality and gender wank, wherein someone appears rather outraged that women have (supposedly) invaded and engaged in war against science fiction.

Reactions are just beginning to spread all over the blogosphere from professional writers’ sites to the meta-areas of media fandom. We at FanHistory are trying to do our best to keep up to date on discussion links as they are posted, but please do help us by contributing to our article on the matter if you can.

]]> http://blog.fanhistory.com/?feed=rss2&p=1001 1 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1000 http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1000#comments Sun, 11 Oct 2009 02:02:17 +0000 Laura http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=1000

Yes, it does appear that FanFiction.Net is down again and has been for at least five minutes. They’re generally pretty good at getting back up again so don’t panic!

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