Slashdot reports that one of Wikipedia's founders, Jimmy Wales, has set his sights set on magazine journalism. After acquiring the ArmchairGM sports community, Wales realized the power of fan culture:

“We learned a lot about enthusiastic fans and communities as we built ArmchairGM,” said Dan Lewis, co-founder of ArmchairGM and vice president of business development at Wikia. “Clearly sports are a topic that a lot of people care about, but there are thousands of others. Adding Entertainment, Local and Politics to the mix is just the first in a series of steps we will take to better enable people to come together online around common interests.”

Henry Jenkins (he stole my blog title by the way) is the expert when it comes to fan culture. I'd be interested to know what he thinks of this.

Personally, I think this focus on fan communities and niche markets is, though probably inevitable, part of a larger trend. This larger trend means that the Web is turning into (always was?) a place to talk to people that agree with you and act like you. As I see it, such tendencies mean that the Web is less a "democratic" space and more a collection of groupthink enclaves