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Paolo Olivi, madonnatribe.com: Artists, Fans, and Web 2.0

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In this guest post, MidemNet speaker Paolo Olivi, founder of fansite MadonnaTribe.com, explains how, from fanzines to web communities, fans have always led the way…

Once upon a time, we used to call them fanclubs. In most cases, an official artist’s fanclub was able to reach fans on a national or international basis, while fan-managed associations had a smaller, sometimes regional scale.

The most lively clubs challenged themselves in the editorial field, creating what were brilliantly labeled fanzines. Long time fans of artists who have been on the scene for more than 10 or 20 years look back at those times with a bit of nostalgia, a lot of self-indulgement, and the constant feeling of “how things were then”.

What happened next - no need to say - was the internet.

The peculiar characteristics of the web perfectly matched the aspirations of amateur fandom publishing. It was (relatively) simple, especially in the times when the web pages were all simple html, it was cheap, it was able to cross borders and languages, and it was quick.



The online version of the artists’ fanclubs debuted more than a decade ago, way before the word ‘blog’ was created, and ages - in internet time - before services like YouTube, MySpace, Flickr or Facebook were imagined. In this sense, fans were piooneers of the web and started developing what we now call web 2.0 content.

Sharing and collaborating were in fact the basic principles of the fanclub experience, and were immediately translated in the online versions, mainly using tools such as message boards, newsgroups, newsletters and chats. It took a while, though, to elaborate a specific prototype of online fanclub, and the early years presented a variety of sites using a mix of such tools, with one or another being predominant.

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