NCLC 249:001 Cyberculture Examination
by Aram Zucker-Scharff

Introduction

BlizzForums

deviantArt

NCC Competencies

Blizzforums in it’s current incarnation (excluding previous forums sharing the same community, etc…) has been in existence since the end of 2000, it was started by a small group who were fans of the computer games made by the Californian company: Blizzard.

Blizzforums operates purely off a forums system, the expensive but extremely good vBulletin system. As the Blizzforums community expanded the founders of the site incorporated to become the company Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. The members/employees of Jelsoft make up the core of the website’s administration and provide essential services, maintaining, upgrading, pruning, and moderating the site. As the site’s size increased the founders selected certain well-known, active, and respected members of the community and gave them moderator powers in order to aid in keeping the site on course. While these appointed moderators (or Mods) have some say in what goes on in the site the final decisions about organization of the site comes down from the Administration of the site (or Admins) who are (mostly) the founders of the site.

Blizzforums reaches almost anyone interested in anything having to do with Blizzard, the discussions there range from in-game strategy to the status of personal within the company. Their attraction is the breadth of their community, which shares a core interest while branching out to a variety of other discussion.

The site has had as many as 928 members on at once and has a total membership of 29,278. However, this number does not include guests who only read the forums or post once. Neither is it an accurate measurement of active membership. 237 members have been active within the last week and 315 have a post count of over 1,000. While this is not quite an accurate measure of activity either, it is close. The actual active membership of the forum numbers somewhere in the low hundreds, this number is a hard one to pin down since membership and activity is so fluid.

There are wide channelsof communication. Club leaders (Admins/Mods) communicate with club members in much the same way as members communicate with members, via posts and private messages (PMs). However there names are specialy colored and they have special titles in order to denote leadership. They can also post Announcements which are denoted by a special symbol, and the second is “Stickys” which are posts which stay attached to the top of any forum. They can also communicate via the front of the site by simply putting in a text message at the top of the forums.

When it comes to activities, Blizzforums mostly orgonises online discussion on their own forums, but externally Blizzforums organizes game-meets, tournaments, and other computer game-based activities. There is also an annual writing and art contest. They don’t meet face to face, at least not in any organized way.

Every once in a while Blizzforums will post up an announcement dealing with the forums, new game content, Blizzard itself, or something otherwise related. This is done via posting an announcement at the top of the main page or creating a popup. There is also a series of ongoing, sometimes specialy sponsored by the administration, political debates.

Interestingly enough, I discovered some information about the origin of the club, originally as a Starcraft (one of Blizzard’s games) fan club. It is also linked to a bunch of other more game specific clubs in the Blizzard “Legacy” ring.

After my examination of the site, I would be interested in more information about the administrators of Blizzforums, while many other forums’ admins have a certain amount of transparency about their identity, Blizzforums’ admins I could find almost nothing about.

deviantArt (dA) was formally established on August 7th, 2000 by graphic artist Scott Jarkoff, web-administrator Angelo Sotira, and venture-capitalist Matthew Stephens. It continues to thrive today.

deviantArt operates on a tiered administration system. Early in it’s lifetime it became a incorporated identity, in order to combat dataflow and money flow problems. The founders who are still employed by DeviantArt Inc. comprise the Core Administration staff along with a few others who have since been formally hired by the corporation. There is then a number of “Staff” who are selected by the Core Administration to help take care of the specifics of the site, moderate the forum, update and administrate online galleries, and compile the best art from the site. All members of the deviantArt officer corps fully participate in the forums and on the site. However, all decisions about deviantArt are made by the Core Administration, the employees of DeviantArt Inc.

The site reaches a extremely wide audience, though origonaly targeted at the makers of “skins” for such programs as WinAmp, it’s high level of feedback and constant updating gradually attracted a wider and wider audience. With it’s current ability to have any user host their own gallery of their own work under a subdomain of their choosing, deviantArt’s audience has expanded to anyone who creates visual, digital or analog and literary art, as well as anyone who is interested in looking at such art, or learning how to do such art.

As of last count, deviantArt is comprised of over 2 million like-minded users with a total of somewhere over 20 million submissions. There is no way to parse users as to their activity, however a great many of these individuals are active on some level. While the number is probably smaller, it is still an impressive amount. Members can be subscribed, which provides sanctuary from banner ads and a number of extra features, or they may be plain members who have access to only the regular site and features.

The leaders of deviantArt communicate in a number of different ways. There is a special announcement panel in which members of the deviantArt leadership announce updates, new features, special deviants, and any other sort of important event. They also use a “note” system in order to communicate privately with members. There is also a commenting system that allows any user to comment on any other users page, submitted works (deviations), or journal entries. They also offer an IRC chanal, and a special real-time communication system called dAmn (deviantART Messaging Network).

deviantArt provides a platform for and encourages “devMeets.” dA member-pages all provide a place for the member to input their geographic coordinates, general location, as well as a variety of location specific site sub-groups. Finally, dA provides a special forum just for organizing devMeets. devMeets are simply gatherings of nearby members (deviants) in some sort of general meeting. These meetings stradle a variety of various activities. Some are simply meetings of like-minded people for a meal, while some are opportunities for collaborative art, and are opportunities for extensive discussions, or explorations of areas, some meets are to attend certain events, such as gallerys etc… Recently deviantArt held it’s first deviantArt Summit on June 17th and 18th of 2005 at the Palladium in Hollywood, California. It was a huge grouping of many deviants and many exhibitions of deviants’ art as well as a number of lectures in artistic form and possibilities for the future of dA. The leaders of dA intend to repeat this every year.

deviantArt publishes a number of various e-newsletters and compilations of the best work on their site (including contest winners). The most famous of these is Suture which combines tutorials about various arts and literature with compilations from a number of artistic and literary categories which are hosted by dA. Most other publications, run by the lower members of the staff, are variations on this theme, doing either both tutorials and compilations, or just one, usually they have narrower scopes however.

While looking over the site, I learned about the uniqueness of the deviantArt. Also I had the opportunity to learn about the various working of the club, how it provides every member with a private page which allows them to host their own work, it also provides a deviantMOBILE service which allows people to upload deviations to their cell phones. dA also provides a prints service to allow people to sell high-quality printed copies of their own work, a watchlist program which allows members to monitor each other, keeping an eye out for any new work from their favorite people.

This Assignment allowed me to practice the following NCC competencies: Communication, in order to effectively read the sites information and write about my findings and organize my ideas. Critical thinking, which allowed me to find facts, analyze and summarize, and find connections between the various parts of my sources. Finally it allowed me to utilize my information technology competency, utilizing technology to find, understand and use technology.

Return to Home