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OTW Fannews: Social Media for Fans
The Wall Street Journal wrote about different fandom activities on different social media platforms. “[T]he CW is trying just about everything in social media. Interestingly, once its fans tell the network which platform they want to use to interact with their favorite shows, the network leans in hard. ‘We attack all the social media,’ said Rick Haskins, the CW’s executive vice president of marketing and digital programs. ‘Very, very quickly, the consumer says ‘this is the social platform we like [this particular show] on.’ When we see upticks, that’s when we move in quickly.'”
OTW Fannews: Awesome creations
Mother Jones wrote about Jennie Lamere, who recently won the “best in show” award at the national TVnext Hack event by helping fans avoid spoilers on Twitter. She did it by writing “Twivo, a new program that allows Twitter users to censor their feeds from mentioning a certain TV show (and its characters) for a set time period.” She was the only solo woman participating. “Hackathons (which have nothing to do with illegal hacking) bring together programmers, developers, and designers, who compete to code an innovative new program in a limited amount of time.” Lamere has already been approached by a company to market her creation. “She came up with the idea for Twivo the night before the competition, and it took her 10 hours and 150 lines of code to complete.”
OTW Fannews: Privacy and preservation
Salon warned consumers that entertainment driven by data gathering “won’t end well.” Author Andrew Leonard described how much Netflix knew about his viewing experience with a particular show: “I hit the pause button roughly one-third of the way through the first episode of ‘House of Cards,’…Netflix, by far the largest provider of commercial streaming video programming in the United States, registers hundreds of millions of such events…Netflix doesn’t know merely what we’re watching, but when, where and with what kind of device we’re watching. It keeps a record of every time we pause the action — or rewind, or fast-forward — and how many of us abandon a show entirely after watching for a few minutes…Netflix might not know exactly why I personally hit the pause button…but if enough people pause or rewind or fast-forward at the same place during the same show, the data crunchers can start to make some inferences.”
OTW Fannews: Legal and Technology Stories
- News about a Google TV that interprets its viewers’ behavior to recommend shows to them raises questions about how useful such a technology would be, and to whom, not to mention the privacy matters involved. “James McQuivey at Forrester Research said consumers will accept these privacy tradeoffs if they see an advantage to the new style of television. ‘If you ask people, of course they will say no,’ McQuivey told AFP, while noting that millions have accepted this type of tracing by connecting their TVs to Xbox consoles with Kinect motion detection where ‘the camera is tracking you all the time’…But he said companies should be prepared to develop privacy policies to avoid government intervention.”
Links roundup for 6 April 2012
Here’s a roundup of stories on creator and fan interaction that might be of interest to fans: Star Trek is certainly one of the original geek canons, and in an interview with StarTrek.com, actress Denise Crosby discussed why she made several documentaries about its fans. “[S]ome people didn’t really get what this was all about,” she said. “They were kind of mystified by it all. I’d come back from a convention and friends of mine, who’d never seen an episode of Star Trek, would say, ‘What? They have conventions? People ask you questions? They dress up? What?’ I thought it was a phenomenon that had… Read more