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Abstract

Genius Media Group Incorporated is a collaborative annotation platform and was founded by Mahbod Moghadam, Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory with the aim to annotate lyrics, which have no license and can be interpreted in form of in- line annotation by members. The first version was launched October 2009 as Rap Exegesis, then it changed to Rap Genius in December 2009 and finally in July 2014 the title Genius was given. Genius members have six different roles that are closely tied to authorizations sequentially: Whitehat, Editor, Moderator, Verified Artist, Mediator and Staff. We monitored Genius activities on firehose for five weeks, collected 1.3 million activities, 762 thousand of them are annotation activities1. We registered 57 thousand unique users and found, that users generate on average 13.33 annotation activities in this period of analysis, which is 0.36 annotation activities per day. The distribution over user groups displays the roles Moderator, Staff, Artist, Mediator and Whitehat. Whitehat embodies the most registered user, but when it comes to drive Genius ahead, then those roles are presented in the following sequence: Artist, Staff, Mediator, Moderator, Editor and at the end is the role Whitehat. Intelligence Quotient (IQ) can be earned by the most of activities and indicate experience of a member. Although a count of IQs is required to do certain activities, for instance to post into forums, but it does not promote automatically a member’s role to become a higher member level. High-quality annotations and decision maker such as an Editor establish nomination criteria. Earning IQs implies to edit pages; a page is edited on average 295 times, which varies greatly from the me- dian (195) times. This indicates that some pages attract users more than others. For developers Genius provides API, documentation and support forum as well as there are sub- domains in different countries and languages. We attempt to discover members' collaboration by editing Genius pages and for this purpose we clarify the social, technical and participation architecture of Genius, such as member’s permissions as well as options, activity types and distribution of page edits. The following technical report is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces the social structure of Genius, how to interact with the user interface, being a member and the relation between member roles, annotation and earned IQs. Section 3 continues with the technical structure, in which Genius subdomains are presented, what technical options are there for developers to bind Genius services in applications, firehose as notifications process as well as demographic trends of users at Genius. Section 4 describes our member activities study on Genius and which new findings we determined. Finally, section 5 presents our conclusions.