To follow up on my post from earlier today, I wanted to point out a few more interesting posts from the C3 blog, these all coming from the first part of 2007, through spring semester.
(Not) Interesting Brand Communities? Fans of the Quotidian Fan communities exist for brands from Pringles and Pillsbury to a MySpace group for Windex.
These Fans Will Follow You...Through Rain and Sleet and Snow and... While cycling teams and stamp collecting might explain some of the goodwill, what can we make of fan expressions expressly dedicated to the mail carrier?
Is Serial Programming a Format or a Genre? Slippery Language in the Popular Press A recent New York Times article calls this fall's serial programming both, but the "failure" of serial programming could, in many ways, be a confusion of form and content.
Quoting and Piracy: How the Industry Lumps Together Two Very Different Activities There's a major difference between stealing content outright and quoting it in a mash-up, but the industry is having a hard time figuring out economic models for how to prosper from fan creativity. Rather than address hard questions, though, many in the industry just prefer to run from fair use and still pretend users have as few rights as possible.
Choking the Golden Goose: In Advertising, Ubiquity Is the New Exclusivity? Based on a New York Times story, this post examines how pervasive advertising is testing the limits of the theory that all publicity is good publicity.
Reverse Product Placement and C3 Members' Ideas in the Popular Press David Edery and Ilya Vedrashko, two figures prominent in the formation of the consortium, are focused on in this BrandWeek article about reverse product placement, which is the process of launching brands from fictional worlds into the "real world."
With Dems in Power, Congress Replaces Constant Indecency Talk with...More of the Same A new Congress brings about the same old rhetoric, as Sen. Rockefeller talks indecency fines for cable with the FCC.
Soap Operas in Convergence Culture and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy "a Genre in Decline" If the industry talks about a genre as if it is inevitably going to disappear, how can we expect anything else?
Cramming That Genie Back into the Bottle: Industry Desires to Protect Copyrighted Video Online A story by Daisy Whitney with TelevisionWeek recently focused on the business model surrounding protection of online content and the industry's desire to protect the status quo.
Valuing 50+Audiences: The Myths of Advertising A great piece from The New York Times focuses on how TV Land is hoping to buck the trend of devaluing audiences over 50 by targeting baby boomers, as television in general struggles with the myth that 18-49 is what matters.
Fan Behaviors: Five Ways of Understanding Modes of Fan Engagement with Media Texts Sam Ford provides a framework for understanding fan engagement derived from a study of pro wrestling fans in the live arena, sparking a continuing conversation about understanding how fans engage with media texts in various settings.
Wrestling Fans Can't Benefit from HD?: Cultural Biases and WWE to HD An HD expert claims that WWE fans won't be able to take advantage of pro wrestling in high-definition because they can't afford an HD set, but is this based on qualitative or quantitative data or just a cultural bias?
Concepts from the C3 Weblog This piece looks at a variety of terms or ideas that have been explored on the C3 blog over the past year-and-a-half, including immersive story worlds, transmedia storytelling, cross-platform distribution, quotability and grabability, pop cosmopolitanism, "fans of fans," the branding barrel, fan proselytizing, and transgenerational storytelling.
