Although we've used the concept brand communities a couple of times, it's important to reiterate that communities aren't created, they are courted. Most brands will need to court a range of different communities and travel across pools, webs, and hubs if they want to reach the full range of desired consumers.

Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.

Although we've used the concept brand communities a couple of times, it's important to reiterate that communities aren't created, they are courted. Most brands will need to court a range of different communities and travel across pools, webs, and hubs if they want to reach the full range of desired consumers.

In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. In an information society, children play with information

...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.

Piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers.

From American Idol to The Matrix participatory media - where old and new media converge by involving fans - is influencing our culture by creating new forms of interactive storytelling. Yet by enabling people to participate in such various media they can converge as a crowd to alter the story to create new modes of engagement, some not necessarily endorsed by the creator - or the brands that back them.