Chess and Social Trends

This blog's association with Chess Club Live (CCL) has been running for 4 1/2 years now. It started with one of those messages in the rare category that I call 'big things in small packages'.

Subject: New message from Michael Chukwuma Mkpadi
Sent: April 26, 2012

I like your chess articles. I run the Facebook page www.facebook.com/chessclublive and the website www.chessclublive. I would love to have your permission to post your articles by RSS as I know our fans would love them.

Regards, Michael, Chess Club Live
Twitter: @ChessClubLive
Wiki: http://wiki.chessclublive.com/

I acknowledged the relationship in a previous post, Chess Club Live (August 2013; 'it's high time I collected those posts into a separate category to give credit where credit is due'). For the past few years I've been including the series of Chess in School posts in that category, Posts with label CCL, but it's now time to change direction.

I offloaded that series of posts into a new category -- Posts with label CIS -- in preparation for a new series where I'm going to look at the sociology of chess. It's a big subject and I won't be surprised if it also runs for more than a year or two.

CCL is a modern phenomenon made possible by the success of social media. While it's had its ups and downs -- squabbles over copyright, surreptitious injections of inappropriate material, heated discussions over the boundaries of the envelope -- the primary direction has been straight up. The following chart shows that it reaches many tens of thousands of people every day.

Chess Club Live (Facebook)

CCL currently accounts for about half of the traffic to this blog -- I know this because the RSS feed breaks from time to time. I'm looking forward to delve further into its mysteries and into the overall sociology that surrounds chess as a global cultural phenomenon.