Quote IconYou will never get a fan to care more about clothes, cars, shoes, or household products than they do about whether Sterek is going to happen on Teen Wolf.

Why Yahoo can buy Tumblr, but it can’t buy Fandom

The unspoken truth behind Yahoo’s much-touted bid to court Tumblr’s younger demographic is that for all intents and purposes, Tumblr culture is fandom culture. There are still plenty of other spaces where fandom exists, but we have never had such a megalithic and central social platform so visibly united under one umbrella. …

Even as Yahoo insists nothing will change, business analysts and media experts are speculating that the company intends to plumb Tumblr for its advertising potential. But if that’s the case, Yahoo should know that when you market to fandom, you have to adopt a whole new way of thinking about marketing, brand advertising, and consumer loyalty. [READ MORE]

(please read this article omg i have never wanted to *drop mic* until this day)

image

(via dailydot)

Aja’s post should be required reading for anyone doing brand management anywhere outside of Facebook. That said…

… this article is about some of the more evolutionarily mature fandoms and not the less organized ones. There are still plenty of ways that this can (and probably will) go wrong for those fan communities and for that bad behavior to infect other fandoms.

But there are also ways that this can (and hopefully will) go very very right.

dailydot:

The dark side of Reddit’s GoneWild

When Gawker’s Adrian Chen revealed the identity of violentacrez, one of the site’s most well-known trolls and a moderators for shady subreddits like r/jailbait, it was seen as a massive attack on the freedom and anonymity that Reddit promises. Chen was labeled a villain, and Gawker was banned from Reddit.

But the aforementioned IamTheFapMaster and other redditors routinely “punish” women posting to GW by revealing their real names and sending their nude photos to teachers and family members. It’s easy to track via the watchdog subreddit, r/ShitRedditSays, which lists out every instance of misogyny, slut-shaming, and general douchebaggery the rest of Reddit dumps onto GW.

edwardspoonhands:

the-science-llama:

If Earth Had Rings
First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.
However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.
Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.
During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.
Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9— Click the photos for captions

DANGIT EARTH! WHY YOU NO HAVE RINGS!

Anybody remember this video?
Zoom Info
edwardspoonhands:

the-science-llama:

If Earth Had Rings
First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.
However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.
Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.
During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.
Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9— Click the photos for captions

DANGIT EARTH! WHY YOU NO HAVE RINGS!

Anybody remember this video?
Zoom Info
edwardspoonhands:

the-science-llama:

If Earth Had Rings
First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.
However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.
Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.
During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.
Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9— Click the photos for captions

DANGIT EARTH! WHY YOU NO HAVE RINGS!

Anybody remember this video?
Zoom Info
edwardspoonhands:

the-science-llama:

If Earth Had Rings
First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.
However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.
Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.
During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.
Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9— Click the photos for captions

DANGIT EARTH! WHY YOU NO HAVE RINGS!

Anybody remember this video?
Zoom Info
edwardspoonhands:

the-science-llama:

If Earth Had Rings
First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.
However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.
Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.
During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.
Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9— Click the photos for captions

DANGIT EARTH! WHY YOU NO HAVE RINGS!

Anybody remember this video?
Zoom Info

edwardspoonhands:

the-science-llama:

If Earth Had Rings

First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.

However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.

Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.

During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.

Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9
— Click the photos for captions

DANGIT EARTH! WHY YOU NO HAVE RINGS!

Anybody remember this video?

vicemag:

Facebook and Censorship’s Slippery Slope

The First Amendment is great, huh? It gives people the right to (mostly) say whatever they like, because the lawyers and landholders who wrote the Constitution recognized that democracy requires people to debate and share opinions without worrying about reprisals or censorship from the government. The cost of this is that you have to allow people to hold racist protests and draw pictures of animals with human sex parts and so on, but allowing people to hold and share beliefs that most people find abhorrent or stupid is how we know we are free. Ayn Rand once said, by way of defending pornography, “Every infringement of human rights has begun with a suppression of a given right’s least attractive practitioners.” We should be free to write and say whatever we want, even if we’re pornographers, racists, or fans of Ayn Rand’s books.

We don’t have those same rights on Facebook, however.

Facebook isn’t just a cool place for you to hang out and chat with your buddies and share hot new content you found surfing the World Wide Web. It’s a platform owned by a massive corporation that makes money off of advertising and can do pretty much whatever it likes with the stuff you post on it. Which isn’t to say Facebook is evil, exactly, but it’s not your friend, and it’s not under any legal obligation to protect speech or use its site to say whatever you like. Zuckerberg and company get to decide what is and is not permissible on their property, and since they own the internet’s second-most-popular site, that gives them a lot of power.

In practice, Facebook uses this power to make itself as advertiser-friendly as possible. This means they suspend users for posting NSFW content and remove photos of “offensive” body parts like dicks and female nipples. They’ve also taken down aggressively racist content and videos of extreme violence. The arguments for banning these kinds of content are simple—Facebook is used by children and millions of users who are offended by that nasty stuff, and the website is supposed to be a place that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life,” not a free-for-all where hate groups can organize and broadcast their poison.

Continue

jkottke:

When Commander Chris Hadfield covered David Bowie’s Space Oddity on board the International Space Station:

how were the intellectual property rights handled?

The song “Space Oddity” is under copyright protection in most countries, and the rights to it belong to Mr Bowie. But compulsory-licensing rights in many nations mean that any composition that has been released to the public (free or commercially) as an audio recording may be recorded again and sold by others for a statutorily defined fee, although it must be substantively the same music and lyrics as the original. But with the ISS circling the globe, which jurisdiction was Commander Hadfield in when he recorded the song and video? Moreover, compulsory-licensing rights for covers of existing songs do not include permission for broadcast or video distribution. Commander Hadfield’s song was loaded onto YouTube, which delivers video on demand to users in many countries around the world. The first time the video was streamed in each country constituted publication in that country, and with it the potential for copyright infringement under local laws. Commander Hadfield could have made matters even more complicated by broadcasting live as he sang to an assembled audience of fellow astronauts for an onboard public performance while floating from segment to segment of the ISS.

We live in a world where sending a guitar into space is trivial while ironing out rights agreements is the tough part.

I was really hoping the answer would be “the ISS is the Sealand of Space.”

adamweinstein:

According to a secret transcript, members of Cooper Union’s board of trustees joked dismissively about student protesters; Jamshed Bharucha called the students’ demonstrations “performance art”; Stanley Lapidus expressed doubts that the pupils “know what they’re protesting.”

“Welcome to 1968,” trustee Mark Epstein quipped, adding, “Haven’t been tear-gassed in decades,” before dismissing the delegation of trustees for lunch.

More from the transcript—in which the board discusses closing Cooper Union down, screws early decision applicants, declares tenure as good as dead, and tries to avoid scrutiny from the state attorney general—on the Village Voice’s Runnin’ Scared blog.

laughingsquid:

Remember Me, A Video Game Set in 2084 About Memory-Altering Technology Gone Awry

Remember Me is a video game published by Capcom set in the year 2084 in a futuristic Neo-Paris. The main character, Nilin, works for a mega-corporation called MEMORIZE that can record, alter, and steal memories using the Sensen implant when her memories are wiped and she joins a resistance movement known as the Errorists. Capcom has created a full interactive journal of the game’s backstory and Sensen’s invention. Remember Me is currentlyavailable for pre-order for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Windows PC, and will launch on June 4th.

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