The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In

[koganbot]

Hurrah, I've been given a column (first one here: The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In) at the Las Vegas Weekly website, where I can actually get paid to write stuff I've always wanted to write - to ask questions, basically, and to intellectualize to my heart's content. The column runs every Thursday* with a brief minicolumn update on Mondays. I welcome your commentary: in fact, will need it, since my hope for the Monday minicolumns is that at least some of them will have me addressing people's comments about the previous Thursday's column.

*The especially sharp-eyed among you will notice that today is Friday, not Thursday. The Las Vegas Weekly is revamping its website and going through something of a shakedown cruise, so things don't always go up in a timely fashion. Some future Thursdays may also end up as Fridays, and some Mondays will be Tuesdays.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Places like Facebook (and the Watts experiment that was in the NYT a few weeks ago) have gone to some lengths to use online communities to find such information. I'm sure major marketing departments at major labels and film companies have used similar methods to systematically determine "taste." I'm thinking specifically of a place called Pop Generation, which is a thinly veiled PR site for Hollywood Records (among other major labels), who use a fan community to get stat information about who's listening to their music. (Which, through a glitch in their web layout, you can access with a series of simple html changes.)

But the Watts experiment is one of the only I know of to try to systematically determine randomness, whereas PopGen et al are trying to calculate probably tastes. And looking at their stats, you see all kinds of weird stuff happening -- no one listens to Paris Hilton, for example, because no one has joined the fan community, whereas there's easily a sample base of upwards of 10,000 for Aly and AJ alone.

Would be interested to know when taste DOESN'T cluster -- which is what interests me about artists like Paris and Ashlee -- and Frank with the New York Dolls, "making their audience," for whom the cluster is yet to exist as a "cluster." Forming new clusters = forming new communities?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*probable, not "probably tastes"