Aug. 24th, 2007

*ramble*

Aug. 24th, 2007 10:49 pm
schmevil: (zatana)
When I got my iMac yesterday, I thought I had a usb cable handy but it appears I do not. This is tragic because I wanted to scan my Marvel Adventures: Iron Man issues. I'm consoling myself with this preview of MA: Avengers #15 (scroll down). God, this whole line of books is just ridiculously cute. It's so cute that its cuteness threatens to overwhelm the stability of the cutetime continuum and cause universal (though cute) destruction.

I also desperately want to scan my favourite sequence from Brian K. Vaughn's Pride of Baghdad. Wicked great book. I found some scenes too emotionally simplistic, and at times the story was perhaps too caught up in being an anti-Lion King, but it's such a sad, beautiful narrative, and Niko Henreichon's pencils are simply lovely. La la la love.

BTW, [livejournal.com profile] cedarlibrarian are you aware that BKV is set to write a Faith story in Buffy Season 8? I haven't been reading the comics (I'm waiting for the inevitable trades) so this totally passed me by. I've never been much of a Faith fan but still, this is good news - BKV will be writing Buffy, and his Faith is guaranteed, by dint of his fabulosity, to annoy me much less than did Noxon!Faith. And his ideas about the series as expressed in this article are certainly promising.

***

YouTube instantly trumped sites like Vimeo, Veoh, and Grouper by converting all uploaded videos into Flash videos that almost anyone could view.* The site's second genius ploy was its permissiveness. While the staff quickly removed pornographic uploads, YouTube wasn't as hasty to take down copyrighted content: music videos, clips from TV shows, and sports highlights. YouTube's first big moment came when someone uploaded the Saturday Night Live sketch "Lazy Sunday" in December 2005. Since NBC hadn't posted a copy itself, everyone went to YouTube. By the time the TV networks and music studios figured out that a third-party site was siphoning away their traffic, Web surfers already thought of YouTube as the one and only online video clearinghouse.

Slate
Nick Douglas
July 18 2007

Sound familiar ljers? Permissiveness + user-friendly interface seems to be a prime indicator of internet success. And that permissiveness doesn't tend to last once commercial success sets in. Douglas also has some interesting things to say about how centralization limits creativity and stiffles vision, which are interesting in the context of the current lj climate.

I was chatting with [livejournal.com profile] metaphoracle the other night about the so-called migration of fans, from lj to other journaling services. From what I've seen, the numbers just don't support there being a mass migration, and I don't think one is likely until the Next Big Thing in social networking has become obvious. Until it's caught on with more than the early adopters. The lj fandom is so used to social networking that, in my opinion, the NBT for this segment of fandom will have to incorporate some of the better features of things like lj, myspace or facebook. It will also have to be bigger than fandom. As much as I'm interested in [livejournal.com profile] fanarchive I don't think anything that comes out of this project will be the next lj.

The advantage of an open, general spaces like lj is that they bring in far more fresh blood than would exclusively fan-run sites, for the simple reason that very casually fannish people are more likely to interact with devoted fen, and perhaps discover a deeper interest in fandom.

So my half-assed prediction is this: that from the recent lj goofiness, we will see develop a social hub and a creative hub, hosted separately, each embodying some cool new development. Projects like Fanarchive have a lot of potential in terms of becoming creative hubs but I doubt the ability of Insane Journal or Journal Fen to foster the same kind of social ecology that lj does - they don't have the numbers or the diversity. (They also don't have the pretty, which is increasingly important online).

[Keeping in mind, of course, that however far news of lj's deletions and guerrilla TOS changes has spread, it hasn't spread through all of lj fandom, or fandom beyond lj, and that many people remain unaffected practically and emotionally.]

My own fannish activities are not limited to lj, though I know many, many people who can't see past the goat. I'm a big fan of message boards and archives. Used to like lists, though now, I can't be bothered with keeping my filters up to date. I like the opportunities for different kinds of social interaction that different internet media allow. I also like seeing how those media affect the creative outupt of fans. I do think that lj and lj culture together produce different kinds of creative expression, distinct from lists and list culture. And I'm honestly excited to see what's next.

***

Ha! I mistakenly labelled one of my icons Strom.

July 2012

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