Meanwhile, in search of a soul mate?

The other day I was on The Walt Bodine Show, an hour-long call-in public radio show that's a longstanding Kansas City institution (as one of my colleagues said "sure, your going to all those international things is ok, but Walt Bodine? Now I'm impressed!").

The topic …

Surrendering to the Realities of the Internet

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has long excelled at communicating with fans. He's the faithful author of a long running blog in which he has been very open with his fans. They have built a strong rapport and have a lot of communication going on there. He blogs often and …

Putting the B(ees) in Buzz

Swarmteams is a project led by Ken Thompson exploring whether the same sorts of processes that insects and other biological entities use to organize group behavior through short term low range signaling can be applied to human social groups such as fans. It bills …

Shout Out to Coolfer Readers

Hi there and welcome if you've just made your way here for the first time through Coolfer's gracious plug. If you're all and only about music, you can click on the music category over on the right. The Business Quandaries category also has a lot of music coverage. Hope …

Live or Virtual? Even I Choose Live.

The internet is often cast as "the virtual" while face-to-face, or as one scholar better termed it, "body-to-body" communication is seen as the locus of all that is real and authentic. Having studied how people use the internet socially since the early 1990s, I've …

Sharp Insights into Indie Music Fandom

I recently read Wendy Fonarow's book Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music.

It's easily one of the best audience ethnographies I have read, in part because she focuses both on the details of behavior -- the microways in which audiences at …

Championship!

I may not be much of a sports fan, but that was one unbelievable basketball game and to be able to down a three-point shot with 2.1 seconds left and pull KU out of a 9 point deficit to a win just makes me say: "Mario Chalmers, you are my new hero!"

And it makes the …

Can't Beat Dancing in the Street

KU won Saturday night, which you either know or really don't care about in the least. I watched at home on TV. I live close to downtown where people had been hanging out in anticipation of the game in bars & restaurants all day long. The split second the game ended I …

Go Jayhawks!

Some of you (particularly the Americans among you) may have noticed that there's this little athletic ritual this time of year called the NCAA basketball championships and that a little ballclub from the University of Kansas called the Jayhawks are in the Final Four.

It …

Music is All about Money

Behold my favorite April fools post (so far) from Swedish independent label Hybris:

Due to illegal filesharing Hybris will have to shut down it's business.

There are simply no economic incentive for our artists to create when copyright laws are not respected.

Hybris …

Kurt Cobain Converses: Cool or Creepy?

From the Internet Nirvana Fan Club comes exclusive news that Converse will launch a Courtney-sanctioned Kurt Cobain sneaker. This is not part of its forthcoming Dead Alternative Guys Converse Century Icons line:

While the Converse Century campaign is also using images …

Quick Richard Thompson Followup

The other day I wrote a post praising Richard Thompson for encouraging the voices of his fans rather than just steamrolling them with his own. The post was inspired by the performance I'd seen him give the night before. [and two Davids left really interesting thoughts …

MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium

In 1992 when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation about rec.arts.tv.soaps, the Usenet fan group that talked about soap operas, I was told to get ahold of Henry Jenkins, who had just finished a book about fandom. Henry was generous enough to send me the page proofs of …

Mesh Conference in Toronto May 21-22

I'll be speaking this spring at Mesh, "Canada's Web Conference" as part of a panel looking at the increasingly blurry boundaries between public and private. Today they launched registration. Here's how they describe Mesh:

Canada's premier Web conference, being held in …

Why I Haven't Been Blogging This Week

Back next week!

The Wonders of Dialogue

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Richard Thompson perform. He played a solo acoustic show -- just him and a well-worn guitar. No fancy nothings to fall back on but his amazing artistry and the beauty of his songs.

And his talent for communicating with his …

Another Great Patronage Example

I wrote last week about Jill Sobule's successful campaign to raise $75,000 direct from fans in order to finance her new album (she got more than that, and quickly). Now I hear, via David Jennings, via Billboard, that UK band Marillion have been doing this for some time …

Facebook: True Fans Only

I wrote a few weeks ago about Nick, who has been on a satiric effort to subvert the Facebook Fan concept by friending any and all big brands he can find. He'd collected about 150 brands. But last night all but a few miraculously disappeared. He's left with only 8 or 9 …

More Creative Musicians Working the Web

Jill Sobule is the latest in a string of musicians figuring out innovative ways to involve fans in their pricing and production processes.* She's out to get $75,000 in donations from fans to help her record her next record and she's quasi-mocking the Public Radio/TV

Canadian TV Alert

If you're in Canada (or close enough to get Canadian TV reception), I'll be participating in a panel discussion on The Agenda tonight about socializing online. Episode description: "How do we socialize online ... and how does being online changes the way we socialize?" …