Yesterday brought a Live Journal flood my way. Hi everyone! There’s lots of meta-fandom activity going on over there, and as someone who’s not on LJ, I know I’ve been missing out. Anyone game for offering a ‘fandom studies on LJ’ primer?

If I were a sports fan not yet there I’d be heading over to check out still-in-beta site FanIQ.com, a which bills itself as “sports talk with a score:”

The Web site, less than a year old, tracks predictions made by media experts and allows fans to create accounts and make predictions. The results of a fan’s predictions are tallied and each user’s score is posted to display their prowess or lack of. (TheState.com)

The site was started by Ty Shay, who used to be the chief marketing officer for hotwire.com, and who offers this origin tale:

Ty was frustrated that there wasn’t an easy way to track the sports predictions he constantly made with his brother. After talking with other fans, he soon realized that accountability for sports predictions was a far bigger problem which included paid “sports experts” and message boards. The FanIQ community is the result of these insights.

This seems like a really clever way to give fans a combination of a game to play, a way to build greater social status/credibility/social capital that takes advantage of their favorite hobby, and a platform for hanging out and socializing with other fans. I like that it is set up to allow users to engage the site in ways that vary in how structured and how social they are. Fans can focus only on their own scores vs the experts, play against one another individually or in leagues, talk in forums, and more. It’s also interesting to strategically pit ‘average fans’ against the mainstream sports media. How long will it be before some of the people who emerge as especially good prognosticators on this site find themselves becoming “paid sports experts?” The site is free and has no advertising, so it’ll be interesting to watch how it fares in the long run. If anyone reading this is spending time on fanIQ please leave a comment with your take on the site.

If sports aren’t your thing but celebrities are, try this alternative, Fafarazzi. As they describe it on the site:

Fafarazzi.com is a Fantasy Celebrity League. Instead of points being scored for homeruns and touchdowns they’re scored for divorces and catfights!

Me, I’m just not competitive enough to do fandom for points.

News reports are giddy with glee that SoaP, while opening at #1, didn’t do as well as was anticipated at the box office. I have a few quick takes on this that I want to throw out.

First, I’m struck by a parallel with the way the press treats political blogs. There’s a very ambivalent relationship — blogs are a novel and timely topic to write about in the news. Things like the SoaP phenomenon shaking up Hollywood, or grassroots citizens organizing through blogs in ways that shake up the political establishment, make fun stories and keep everyone feeling appropriately current. But at the same time, if bloggers are really going to start being driving forces in politics, that’s pretty disruptive not just to the political establishment but also to the press. So even as the press goes to bloggers for their stories, they also expend a lot of energy disparaging their value to public discourse. In the same way, fan activity that disrupts Hollywood also disrupts the priviledged position of professional film critics (who were not invited to prescreenings of SoaP). So at the same time it’s great storytelling to build up the Soaps on a Blog thing, if participatory fandom really works well, it can also be a great big threat to the same people who are telling those stories. That’s why I think they’re so happy it’s merely going to be profitable and not a block buster.

Second, I remember back in the 90s everyone was always fretting about how the internet turns everyone into overactive flamers. Turned out there really weren’t all that many people being obnoxiously argumentative and insulting online, but flames were so visible and emotionally salient, it seemed like there were zillions and everyone was doing it (cite: Martin Lea & Russell Spears). I wonder if the visibility and interest-value of the online SoaP phenomenon led people to overestimate the real number of individuals who were involved.

There’s a piece up in the Post about Fox’s digital division, which is home most notably to MySpace. The article discusses the meager revenues earned by this division relative to the others, but remarks that:

One upside for a corporate parent, Levinsohn said, is that much of this generation’s Web content is user-generated (see: YouTube.com), meaning payments to its creators are not required. For instance, in May, News Corp. bought online karaoke site kSolo.com, which lets users record their own versions of hit songs. The company will apply kSolo’s technology to Fox Interactive sites, allowing users to create free content for News Corp. that the company can use to sell advertising.

On the one hand, I am all for the celebration of fan creativity, and I certainly believe it’s in everyone’s best interest for even megacorporations to cooperate and nurture that creativity. On the other, I don’t like that fans are providing free labor so that Rupert Murdoch and the people who bring us FoxNews can make more money. It’s not like those people are just scraping by.

Where is the line between enabling fans’ talents and exploiting them?

Hello to those of you following Henry’s link over here. Obviously, I was quite flattered to find such a lovely plug for this site on his blog and appreciate your clicking that link.

When I was writing my dissertation on the fan community rec.arts.tv.soaps circa 1992 someone (Steve Jones maybe?) told me to get ahold of Henry, who promptly sent me the page proofs for Textual Poachers, which instantly became one of my all time favorite reads. Anyone who would compare texts to my favorite children’s story, the Velveteen Rabbit, is a genius in my book. If you follow that link you can read it and even see the original illustrations! Make sure you have hankies handy. In case it doesn’t go without saying (how could it not?), if you don’t already read Henry’s blog and books and are interested in fandom, you’re missing out on the main course.

As he notes, I’m writing a lot about music fandom, which forms the bulk of my own active engagement with online fandom these days, but I’m keeping an eye on what’s getting buzz or should be getting buzz around other media as well. My hope is that this site will eventually hold particular appeal for fans and/or professionals who are working with online fans of anything.

Please don’t be shy about jumping in, making recommendations for things I should write about, or just saying hi.