Yesterday, I went to SocialDevCampChicago with the goal to learn more about social media, network with people involved in the area and to have a good time. All goals accomplished. I didn’t attend as many presentations as I would have liked. I was just too busy talking to people, eating, volunteering, socializing, networking and preparing my own presentation. I managed to talk to or at least catch a glimpse of one or two people from StartUpWeekend, Ann Arbor. It was interesting to catch up and see where one of those startups was in terms of development. Some of them presentations were supposed to have been fantastic including Lindsey LaVine’s Legal Considerations for Social Media and Saper Law Offices’s Legal Considerations Part II. Legal Liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Communications Decency Act.

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These days, it seems like I’m getting half my fandom news from Mashable. It has so many news items that have fandom related impact. There was an article about 50 Cent creating an official social networking site for his fans today. Totally fantastic. I bet that catches on. One of the reasons that I think official sites don’t get more traffic is they offer limited interaction and limited new content. Fansites are generally better at providing a certain type of content and allowing increased increased interactivity between like minded fans and the musicians. Major pluses. Major incentive to use a site: Better product for fans. In terms of fan interaction on a pan fannish level though, if it catches on, it might likely spell a step back in interaction between various fan groups from different fandoms and less let me get to know you and everything about you. That could be seen as a minus.

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Back in the day in fandom, say 10 years ago, fans were forced to stay together out of necessity. If you wanted access to information, there were very few places to get it. Information was just very centralized. People who entered that at the right time succeeded. Some of those centralized resources are still around. Think FanFiction.Net.

But then along came services like egroups, onelist, GeoCities and Tripod. Suddenly, fandom information was really decentralized. Fans could create small websites for extremely niche audience. If you were an author, that might just be your own stories. By posting them to your own private mailing list, by posting them to your own little website, you could have a lot more control. Power in fandom decentralized. And it became easier to have a much more specific fandom identity and not lack for new content.

But that model appears to have gone out the window with the advent of Web 2.0.

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