Dreamwidth too fandom-centric?

[charmian]

morineko has some thoughts about Dreamwidth possibly being too fandom-centric to attract non-fandom potential users, and how the front page may be giving visitors the wrong impression. Although the definition DW users for a 'creative artist' might be a very broad, it does sound like the site is something like Deviantart, or a writing community. (For the record, I am totally not an artist...) IIRC LJ's marketing angle was about "sharing your life" w/ your friends, so this does mark a departure. (Right now, the site emphasizes that it's versatile and can be used for many things) I suppose also, since the word "blog" isn't used, it's not exactly clear what kind of site it is (I think these days people might not be sure what journal refers to).


It can't really be denied that fans are a large presence on DW, and that matters, because on this kind of service, the future userbase will be probably drawn from the "social graph" (meaning people they know) of the previous users (absent types of marketing other than the viral), and because this will shape the tone of the service, the user culture, and probably the development of new features.

Actually, I had previously been talking to some people who said that rather than fight the impression that DW is a fannish service (rather than a service directed at everyone, although now that I read the site copy it really does seem to be aiming at some kind of niche rather than a generalist audience; BTW, they really ought to explain on the homepage how DW differs in terms of features from LJ, also, there's something weird about that red box on the homepage in IE7), DW should instead embrace it and market heavily to the fan audience, rather than make a lot of claims (this occurred several months ago) that it is NOT a fan service, etc. I think there's some truth in this; simply because a service is "for fans" doesn't mean that other people can't sign up, though of course this really depends on how it's presented, and a company often doesn't have 100% control over its public image anyhow.

Maybe I'm totally wrong about this as well, but it seems to me that the word "artist" is somewhat vague, especially as IMHO, LJ (and forks) simply well... kind of behind when it comes to non-textual media, and only adequate when it comes to textual media. Wordpress and Posterous both have advanced media features, and Tumblr has sort of a template for producing picture posts, and also attempts to market itself to artists (they explicitly say that they are trying to go for the creative market in some of their materials. I may blog on this), and a LOT of sites are trying to put out features for bands and audio artists to use their service. The market for artists using social media is very competitive these days, it seems.

Also, it seems there's a tension behind "artist" and "privacy." Nowadays, especially in these "DIY marketing, we don't have enough budget for anyone to market your book/photos/band" days, artists seem forced to relentlessly publicize themselves, and seek the tools that help them to do that, such as SEO (not an expert, but IIRC LJ has bad SEO) and being on simultaneously many social networking platforms. elena linked me to a tool that helps bands update a gajillion different blogging/social networking platforms at once. Artists using social media as artists seem to be enterprise-level users who seek publicity and engagement with all.

I've seen cases on LJ where an aspiring professional artist began to find success and found that for blogging professionally they needed to get something else, like move to their own domain and start using Wordpress. LJ's domain forwarding is crappy, which doubtless contributes to this. So LJ works more like a social network than a blog because it's typically inward facing rather than outward facing, and thusly, probably the biggest reason for an artist to use an LJ-type service is to interact with existing fans (of them, that is) on the service, if they already exist there in large quantities.

Comments

[charmian]

Hi!

I have to say, I'm more of a blogging kind of person. I feel what you're saying. I'm on LJ-type platforms for the discussion. (I figure it might also be found on some forums/message boards) I think the thing is, if you imagine social media as a graph with two axes, broadcast<----->social and light<------>heavy (in terms of depth/length of thought, potentially), blogs are on the broadcast/heavy part, and facebook is on the light/social part, and on the line that is formed between the two, Tumblr and Twitter are kind of between them. But LJ is both heavy and social. (This idea came from a post I saw... I may blog about this later)

Oh, which site is that? Yeah, perhaps that is because "journaling" is often seen as written.

[piranha]

yeah, that's how i see the different services too, as points in various places on a graph like that. that's be an interesting graph to draw.

i'd be more happy with the LJ clones if they facilitated discussions better; the advantage of usenet is that it keeps it mostly in one place (while also allowing crossposting); here it can easily frazzle among many different journals, mostly unconnected.

on the other hand, here i can share more personal things than i ever would on usenet. and i know some people who use LJ solely to broadcast, not to interact, which make it very bloggy. i don't know that i'd bother with blogger or wordpress instead; i tried them, but, eh... (i really don't want to lose the interactive part though, so i am probably just not the right target audience for them).

i think my ideal would be a site that does complex content management, something built on drupal, for example; announcements, forums, blogs, galleries, all connected.

the photo site i decided on is http://smugmug.com -- not cheap, but it came out on top of all the ones i looked at for my purpose. and it's even easier to post my images to DW from there than from LJ scrapbook.

[charmian]

Yeah, I need to track down the blog entry that had that.

Actually, Virb is like that (see my past entry). They have announcements, forums, blogs, galleries, audio as well, and they have the ability to form groups and then say you just want to share this content with one of those groups.

I actually think at some point someone will create a blogging site that does have that kind of granular privacy that LJ has. (Posterous allows you to have a private blog, actually, so if you don't use filters, it may be a good substitute for LJ in that sense)

Ah, I've heard of them.