A Good Example of Letting Go

One of the hardest things about coming to terms with online fan bases is being ok with their criticism. I think all of us have a strong desire to only have nice things said about us. Trying to shut down voices that disagree can be a very understandable knee jerk …

From TV Show to TV Brand

Yahoo! and Deep Focus have released the major findings from their survey of 2000 television viewers about how they use the internet to connect with TV shows and with what results. Among the key findings:

- A third of TV viewers go online to engage their favorite shows …

Guest Post: Knowledge communities: Information, interpretation, and the currency of the era

Ryan M. Milner's post a couple of weeks ago highlighting some of his findings in the analysis of Bethesda's

The Biggest Online Fans are Sports Fans

The European Interactive Advertising Association recently released a study showing that sports fans are twice as likely to use the internet while watching TV than are 'average' internet users. As the report on this posted at Netimperative explains:

Over a third (36%) …

Managing and Mocking Identities

The worlds of politics and fandom have been merging for some time, and it's never been clearer than in this US election cycle where "user-generated content" from YouTube debate questions to Obama girl videos to Facebook groups to political blogs have been so important …

Metallica admit some blunder, blunder anyway.

Metallica have offered a rationalization for demanding that those invited to a listening party take down the reviews of the album they wrote. Oops, just some underling's dumb move, honest. On Metallica.com, they write:

While we occasionally enjoy reading the various …

Internet Inquiry (my new book!) ready for prepurchase

The book I co-edited with Annette Markham about the use of qualitative research methods, Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, is now available for prepurchase at Amazon. It's scheduled to exist on paper between covers next month, just in time for fall classes. …

Guest Post: Industry groks geeks? Producers, fans, and an era of sudden interactivity

My student at the University of Kansas, Ryan M. Milner, recently finished an excellent Masters Thesis about fans of the game series Fallout and I've asked him to write up some of its many insights to share with you. Here's his first of what I hope will be a short series …

Burnt Bridges

The Calgary Herald offers an interesting take on Metallica's "Mission: Metallica" online program:

Internet users have a lot of raspberries for Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, who in 2000 turned in illegal downloaders, but now wants to jump on the digital bandwagon. [...] …

A Few Quickies

I'm still far from home though (literally) out of the woods, having conceeded to the rain at Acadia Nat'l Park, but not quite ready to return to a life of blogging just yet. I figure I've slept in 12 places in the last 26 nights, and though I've been having a FABULOUS …

On Vacation

I'm on vacation for a few weeks and too busy being a tourist to blog. But hey, there are nearly 400 posts in the archives so dig into the deep past if you miss me. Otherwise, fear not, I'll be back before the ides of June.

10 Best Practices of Online Music Promotion

Get your music streaming : If you want people to get into your music, they need to be able to hear it. Get your entire catalogue up at Last.fm, load those songs on MySpace, make sure iMeem and iLike have your tunes, find out what services people are using in the regions …

War of the Concepts: Virus vs Spread

Last Thursday and Friday I had the pleasure of attending a retreat of the Convergence Culture Consortium, an alliance between a core group led by Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, industry partners, and consulting researchers made …

Monday Copenhagen, Wednesday Toronto, Friday Montreal

Next week I'm living the globetrotter life, and I want to invite readers to come by and hear me talk if you're in the region.

Monday, May 19, I am going to be in wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen where I will not be singing Danny Kaye songs, but will be talking about how …

Coldplay vs. Judas Priest -or- The Benefits of Widgets

Last week, Coldplay made their new single "Violet Hill" available free for one week (one week? lame) for download from their official website. Last.fm tracked its listens and what a lot of them there were:

10,000 times in the 5 hours since the track was released. That's …

Frank Sinatra Got It

USA Weekend, that vapid Sunday newspaper insert, had a tribute to Frank Sinatra on the tenth anniversary of his death that included reminiscences from many who knew him. Among them was his daughter, the wonderfully named Nancy, who revealed:

My dad may have been old …

Appropriating Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins has been blogging of late about discovering he's become a comic strip character. Today he shares this one. Made me laugh so I'm passing it on to the other fandom geek readers who may not have seen it:

My own life as a comic strip character is way less …

Uh, yeah, I do twitter

I initially expressed lots of doubts and, truth be told, I still have a lot of them, but I have relented. If, for reasons I cannot fathom, you find yourself wondering "gee, what is Nancy doing today?" or just feel an overwhelming urge to have me in your sphere of …

The Lost Librarians of National Defense?

Information Week has an interesting article up about Lost fandom. It talks about Second Life recreations of Lost spaces, ABC's official sites, and Lostpedia, the wikipedia for Lost fans:

The Lostpedia statistics page shows that the site has grown to nearly 33,000 …

How good a friend is a Last.fm friend?

With my colleague Andrew Ledbetter at Ohio University, I've been finishing up a paper looking at relational development amongst "friends" on Last.fm. Our paper's been accepted for presentation at the Association of Internet Researchers' annual meeting in Copenhagen in …