Music news - Send in the clowns

Social network or criminal gang? It's all who you ask. Horrorcore rappers Insane Clown Posse have built a loyal following that responds to their outsider message and unique perspective. Their Juggalo community has their own slang, their own festival (The Gathering of the Juggalos), and now they have their own social media site, Juggalobook.com.

The site is just now splashing the media with a heavily borrowed look and feel. They've made changes, like the prompt for status updates is "What up Ninja?" instead of "What's on your mind?" But these tweaks are very minor. It probably won't be long before they get the cease and desist from Facebook. Their servers are already overloaded just keeping up the current user load, so that may not matter.

The more interesting question is who started it. ICP has no mention of JuggaloBook on their site. It may have just been an enthusiastic fan that registered the site with GoDaddy. For the paranoid, it could even be a government plot to track the Juggalos, given that the FBI named the Juggalos as a "loosely organized hybrid gang" last year.

Regardless, JuggaloBook joins a host of ICP-centric forums and chat spaces. It's an interesting paradigm shift to the past. While Facebook and Google+ aim to be general appeal portal sites, JuggaloBook reaches back to the era of specialized bulletin boards. While the site pays lip service to building communities of "homies", almost everybody shares their updates with the world because on JuggaloBook, everybody's a homie.

Whoop! Whoop!