I, for One, Welcome Our New Cylon Overlords

Boston (with apologies to Kent Brockman).
So, over the last few days I've found myself inadvertently in the centre of some degree of controversy in the online Battlestar Galactica fan community. This was sparked by my report from the BSG panel at MiT5 last weekend. People more closely aligned with that fan community have posted some very insightful thoughts here on my blog, but in the meantime the discussion has moved over to where I think it properly belongs - the Battlestar Wiki blog. Additionally, audio and video from the original presentations has also been posted. I wish the community well in deliberating the implications of the papers presented at MiT5, and in its outreach endeavours to female fans of BSG. As a BSG fan myself (going right back to the movies several eternities ago, much as it pains me to admit this) I'm also likely to drop in to the wiki every once in a while to see how it's developing - it would be nice to see a few more spoiler warnings for those of us in televisionally challenged regions who haven't yet succumbed to bittorrenting the whole lot, though! (In fact, the BSG wiki reminds me quite a bit of the Perry Rhodan wiki I mentioned here a while ago - here's hoping that the BSG series in its new incarnation will be blessed with a similarly lengthy run...)

For me, the debate kicked off by the papers also highlighted some of the pitfalls of live conference blogging - in covering the papers, it was my blog and not the blogs and Websites of the original presenters which became a focal point for the initial discussion, and some readers appeared initially to be unsure where to draw the line between the presenters' own voices, and my commentary (for the record, I try to indicate as clearly as possible when and where I add my own views to my summary of the presentations I blog - and I was somewhat surprised, too, by the casting of wikis as a more advanced technology that is supposedly less accessible to female contributors). As Julie Levin Russo points out in her comment here, I'm only the messenger - and I hope that the recordings from the panel which are now available will show that the message wasn't altered overly much during transmission.

Technorati : Battlestar Galactica, MiT5, Perry Rhodan, community, conference, fandom, science fiction, wikis
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