A nice example of fans appropriating pop culture on the net: Over on the blog Insanely Great News, Lost fans have created PDF labels that replicate the food containers from the show and put them up to share with other Lost fans. As they say, while preparing for a Lost party:

… we realized that normal food wasn’t gonna cut it tonight. We wanted to eat like Hurley and drink like Desmond, and thus was born the Lost Label Project - an effort to make our pantry look way more like this.

And because the best part of making something cool is sharing it, we created a downloadable Label-Maker kit. Just grab this PDF, print it out, tape it to some beer bottles, and drink to your hearts content. Change the words and turn everything you own into a Dharma ration!

The comments expressing gratitude, telling how they used the labels, and critiquing their choice of barcode, are a succinct demonstration of how fans use pop culture materials to serve one another and as material for play.

Via Techdirt comes word that Dragonball is requesting, demanding, insisting that all fans who want to start a fan site register it first with them.

First I think “ha ha ho ho he he.” Then I think “are they going to run around suing those who don’t? what a pain for the fans and what a way to make them hate them, but probably an effective way to chill their fan activity.” And ultimately I agree completely with the Techdirt take:

In this case, it seems like the company is trying to find a balance between protecting its own trademark and allowing fans to continue, but at some point people need to realize that any attempt at controlling word of mouth efforts pretty much destroys the whole point of any word of mouth promotion.

It’s not viral, bottom-up, grassroots, or quite as much fun if it’s on a short corporate leash. Anyway, a google search turns up 1,450,000 hits for “Dragonball fan site” so the genie’s probably out of the bottle on that one…

A&E has launched a fantasy-league sort of contest to go along with their re-running of the Sopranos. Players have an online board:

THE SETUP: Collect game pieces - in ads online and in the real world - and score points every time a new episode of The Sopranos premieres on A&E.

THE PAYOFF: The top scoring player wins a suitcase with $100,000 in cash, and everyone has a chance to win weekly prizes.

From their descriptions of the rules:

The Sopranos A&E Connection is an online interactive game…a scavenger hunt meets fantasy sports. Collect game pieces that represent characters, settings, and objects from the world of The Sopranos on A&E. Then, each Wednesday when a new episode of The Sopranos airs on A&E, you’ll earn points when the pieces in your collection appear in the show. The player who scores the most points at the end of Season 1 will win a suitcase with $100,000 in cash! Plus everyone has a chance to win weekly prizes just for signing up!

The way you place your pieces on the game board affects how many points you’ll score. Pieces that are next to each other (horizontally or vertically) will score more points if they appear on screen together. So if you arrange the Tony piece next to the Cigar piece, you’ll score double points (20 points for each piece) every time Tony and the Cigar appear on screen at the same time. If you arrange Tony, the Cigar and the Gold Chain game pieces next to each other and they appear together you’ll earn triple points (30 points for each piece). There are also x2 and x3 bonus boxes scattered on the game board. Each piece placed on these squares will earn double or triple points. Become an A&E Insider – http://aetv.com/insider for tips and tactics on how to play.

Like the concept of fantasy soaps, but with a cash payoff worth playing along for, this seems to focus on the dullest parts of the narrative, and is based entirely on luck and persistence rather than skill or actual engagement with the narrative. At least people can play in groups as well as alone, which adds a social layer it otherwise lacks. It’s an interesting effort to get people engaged socially and playfully around television narrative, which is perhaps even more important with a show that has aired already and is available on DVD. It looks from their point boards like they’ve got some viewers doing it.

Any readers checked it out? Anyone have any sense of how well it’s working for them?

This has been Boing Boinged, but in case you missed it, here’s notes on a panel from The National Association of Television Program Executives called  Engaging for Insight: Putting the Power of Fan Cultures to Work for You.

The panel included:

Moderator(s): Stacey Lynn Koerner, President, The Consumer Experience Practice, Interpublic Group of Companies
Panelist(s): Larry Lieberman, Chief Marketing Officer, Virgin Comics LLC
Lydia Loizides, Vice President, Media & Technology Analytics, The Consumer Experience Practice, Interpublic Group of Companies
Jim Turner, Vice President, Digital Media, A & E Television Networks
Ilya Vedrashko, Emerging Media Strategist, Hill Holliday

Good reading.

Yesterday I reported on Disney’s talk at the CES in which they talked about the importance of online fans. Now CBS, in their talk there, are also talking that talk:

LAS VEGAS - Fans of CBS shows will soon be able to slice clips from prime-time shows, send them to friends and even “mash” them together in ways that only a short time ago would have triggered complaints of copyright infringement.

CBS Corp. chief executive Leslie Moonves said Tuesday during his first keynote at the International Consumer Electronics Show that his company would embrace products and technologies that allow viewers to “time shift” and “place shift” his network’s shows and interact with them in new ways.

Moonves said college basketball fans, for instance, would be able to use videoconferencing to hang out in a “virtual skybox,” cheering in a group and discussing plays along the way.

Fans of “Star Trek” could visit a computer-generated Starship Enterprise in the virtual world of “Second Life.”

CBS is also designing its Web sites to encourage interaction among fans of the CBS crime drama “CSI” and “The L-Word,” which appears on the CBS-owned Showtime cable channel.

Corporate-sponsored mashing up seems to be the new trend, and a cool one . It’s good to see a shift from “THEY’RE STEALING OUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY!!!!” to, as Moonves says, “letting fans share snippets makes sense because it allows the network to tap into the passion dedicated viewers have for a particular show.”