§ Miyazaki’s attendance is confirmed, as are John Lasseter, Tim Burton, and Robert Zemeckis, all making their first appearances at Nerd Prom.

§ This Chicago Trib piece by Maureen Ryan contains much insight and information:

Four decades ago, fans of comic books gathered in the basement of a San Diego hotel not just to buy and sell rare issues, but to share their enthusiasm with each other and with the luminaries of the trade. The 40th annual San Diego International Comic-Con, which takes place July 23-26 and now attracts a capacity crowd of 126,000, has always been about the cultivation of those direct, personal connections.That is the reason for Comic-Con’s rise and its massive success: It’s about recognizing and honoring the bonds between the individuals who make movies, TV shows and comic books and people who care passionately about the best that pop culture has to offer.

Comic-Con isn’t important because superhero movies are successful. That’s like saying Twitter is successful because famous people are on it. No, Twitter is successful because it, like Comic-Con, levels the playing field.

We hadn’t thought about it that way, but it’s totally true. On Twitter and to Comic-Con you can run into ANYONE. (Last night, during the wee hours, our Twitter feed was filled by an unlikely mix of Peter Serafinowicz, Michael Kupperman, Neil Gaiman, Sarah Palin, and Chris Jericho.)

According to the piece, con organizers are considering running programming on Wednesdays to ease up the logjam; several TV events have also been moved to the Hilton Bayfront.

1 COMMENT

  1. I’ve been wondering what the most popular motivations are for tweeting about what you’re doing at any given moment, or following someone’s tweets, if it’s not wanting to know about the minutiae in someone’s daily life. I joked to a guy yesterday that a tweet might consist of “I’m eating some M&Ms right now. Half a bag left.” Celebrities are a big part of Twitter right now, and are said to be largely responsible for the service’s growth, but that’s because there are many people who want to follow the stars’ daily lives. How different is following celebrities’ tweets from seeing pictures of them doing everyday things in US?

    There are different perspectives on Twitter, though:

    Some bloggers and Twitter users have expressed concern that the once-cultish site is being overwhelmed by celebrities and media hype, while others are excited by Twitter’s ever-growing reach.

    “It’s a big milestone. This brings Twitter mainstream,” said Andrew Cherwenka, a Huffington Post contributor and Web developer at Trapeze.com, referring to Kutcher and Winfrey’s Twitter breakthroughs.

    “A lot of people are saying this is going to be the death of Twitter, and I don’t understand that at all,” Cherwenka added. “It’s just another stage in Twitter’s acceleration.”

    versus

    Among the findings: Turns out that 55 percent of Twitters are women, compared to 45 percent men. However, it also happens that men have 15 percent more followers than women, and that both men and women are more likely to follow men rather than women. That’s a “stunning” development for the Harvard Business researchers, who found that most other social networks are far more centered on content created by women.

    Also interesting: The fact that the “typical” Twitter user tweets “very rarely,” with the median number of “lifetime tweets” for a given Twitter user is … well, just one, while about half of all Twitters update their feeds barely once every 74 days, according to the study.

    Meanwhile, the top 10 percent of Twitter busybodies are creating 90 percent of the content on Twitter, the survey found; compare that to the findings for other social networks, where the top 10 percent of users account for just 30 percent of the activity.