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This paper examines how the relationship between consumers and producers of cultural products is shaped by the proprietary nature of digital platforms. Drawing on four years of online observation and analysis, we examine the relationship between the producers of online Chinese fiction, amateur writers, and their consumers, i.e. the fan communities of readers who respond to their work. Enabled by Chinese literary websites, readers act like sponsors who provide emotional and financial incentives for writers to produce online fictions by commenting, voting, and sending money. Readers become actively involved not just because of the content of the stories, but because they form strong commitments to stories and their writers, and gain reciprocity and a sense of self-determination during the interactional process. We argue that although writers are freer from state control online, they are still beholden to the whims of their fans because of what we call the commissioned production of fictions. We contribute to fan community studies by analyzing how commercialized website settings structure the strategies available to participants, how these settings affect the content of the cultural products, and how the Chinese historical and cultural contexts impact the dynamics of the online community.

Blogs, regularly updated online journals, allow people to quickly and easily create and share online content. Most bloggers write about their everyday lives and generally have a small audience of regular readers. Readers interact with bloggers by contributing comments in response to specific blog posts. Moreover, readers of blogs are often bloggers themselves and acknowledge their favorite blogs by adding them to their blogrolls or linking to them i n t h e i r p o s t s . T h i s p a p e r p r e s e n t s a s t u d y o f b l o g g e r s " o n l i n e a n d real life relationships in three blog communities: Kuwait Blogs, Dallas/Fort Worth Blogs, and United Arab Emirates Blogs. Through a comparative analysis of the social network structures created by blogrolls and blog comments, we find different characteristics for different kinds of links. Our online survey of the three communities reveals that few of the blogging interactions reflect close offline relationships, and moreover that many online relationships were formed through blogging.