Monday, June 10, 2002

Community Discussion Newcomers to the blogging world are often very, very surprised—it's not just a world, it's a community in the truest sense of the word. It's warm, inviting and friendly, just like an old-fashioned real world community. Community is a word that is tossed around so often that I thought it had lost all meaning -- and my career includes a stint running portal technology for a set of 60+ internet sites with over 300,000 users in total. In my blogging experience, what I have found online is a level of community that hasn’t been seen since the late 1980s before the Internet became a piece of everyday life. A good analogy for the blogging community is the following: Blogging feels like a small rural town. The roads may not always be paved, sometimes the electricity goes on and off but the people are friendly and everyone is happy to help you. When you start blogging, you won't find the fit and finish of a commercial product like Microsoft Word (the road isn't paved), the technical support is, well, interesting (the electricity goes on and off) but what you will find is worth the journey. If you need help with your blog or something that you are writing, post it to your blog and you’ll probably be surprised at the level of help you are offered.  Detailed examples are here: http://www.fuzzygroup.com/go/?blogCommunityExamples 8:25:20 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Creating communities from thin air "Since I don't yet feel part of a blogging community (I've only really been at it for a couple of weeks - I have no idea how long it takes. Or perhaps I have nothing interesting to say??) my thoughts are very much on how you become part of a community and how you can encourage communities to form around shared ideas and values. I think there is a role for technology to play here." 11:07:48 AM  Google It!  comment  []

Saturday, May 11, 2002

A conversation with Matt Haughey Design for Community: Chapter 2 Meet Matt Haughey, proprietor of MetaFilter. "Like most community endeavors, there needs to be a critical mass of sorts, before real interaction takes place." "The best discussions seem to be exactly that – experts on a particular subject will see something mentioned on MetaFilter, then post informative comments that support or contradict the original thread. It makes for some really great discussions and I think everyone benefits from the information sharing." "There's a wide variety of characters that inhabit the site, so you never know how where discussion threads will lead." " . . . I decided to stop speaking at the community of readers, and start speaking to them, engaging them. . . . Suddenly I felt closer to the community. . . . that's when it really started feeling like a place, and not just a site." " . . . there's a community and a code of ethics, guidelines, and unwritten rules that people follow. . . . the small town feel of MetaFilter means that discussions are almost always civil and respectful." " . . . pitfalls that other communities face. After a period of growth, will the original users stop reading and participating? How do you teach new users the ethics and guidelines the veterans of the site follow? How many people is too much?" " . . . everyone has to find their perfect place to hang out. . . . A very successful community creates a special place in a lot of people's hearts. People are what make a community great, not necessarily the administrator or moderators . . . " "To sum up the good qualities of a community builder, pick something you're passionate about, devote the necessary time to building a site around it, stick with it for as long as it takes, keep it going as long as you can, and be open with your users. That's not too much to ask, now is it?" 1:08:19 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Friday, May 03, 2002

Chapter 12: A Conversation with Howard Rheingold He wrote the seminal book on the subject called "The Virtual Community," and, though it was published in 1993, he started it in 1988. That's way before the web, even in real years. " . . .  'the social web.' We're looking to the inevitable emergence of social communication on the web, which previously had been only a publication medium. . . . It can be a place where people who share an affinity can come together. Asynchronous conversations enable people in different times and places to have continuing dialog. Structured conversations enable you to find the subjects that interest you very quickly. All of those meant that the conditions were right for the emergence of the web as a social medium, which in fact we have seen." "Virtual communities are a subset of online social networks." "One of the things that's interesting about community on the web is that most software affords the use of links in conversation." "I think we will begin to see people aggregating numbers of people to do things." "And it has nothing, really, to do with technology. Technology is something you master in order to participate in these other benefits." " . . . will we see an emergence of a literacy of netiquette is: will we see intelligent political discourse continue online and will that have an affect?" 2:55:08 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Friday, April 12, 2002

Community's value "The value of the network increases with the square of the number of participants." [via Slashdot] 2:51:12 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Review by Tom Matrullo "David Weinberger's new book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined {A Unified Theory of the Web} (Perseus Books, 2002) takes an impossible subject - the whatness of the Web - and gives us several well landscaped avenues tending toward a central insight of great value." " . . . 'The way we look to marketers…is precisely how we don't look to ourselves'" " . . . Small Pieces is very much an effort to look at the Web in the light of an understanding of human nature that resonates with Heidegger's thinking about the human, about tools, and about time. . . . It's as if our bodies and their nuisance appurtenances of time, space and matter were to be drained off, leaving a sort of puree of human intentionality. In a way, our Web selves are newly naked . . . " " . . . interests rapidly connect microgroups unobstructed by snow, traffic, or distance . . . " " . . . the human condition is in a rather sorry state: we are profoundly alienated from nature, from the divine, from our origins, our ends, our neighbors, our hearts and ourselves. . . . It is from this . . . 'anorexic' realm that the Web offers us a glimmer of a means of escape." "A key paradox for Weinberger, is that the Web's apparent incorporeality enables us to recover a rich mode of long-untapped relationships with one another - and with the world - that reflect the full-bodied experience of life as it is when it is fully 'lived.' . . . the Web keeps putting forth fresh clusters of individualized peers." "These new relationships manifest themselves through . . . 'fat' knowing as opposed to the spectral utilitarian marshalling of facts that passes for 'formal' knowledge in the traditional temples of establishment intelligence: universities, news organizations, think tanks, databases, research labs, and the like . . . The Web incorporates richer forms of social interaction and knowledge that seemed well on their way to oblivion . . . " "'Our experience of the Web is closer to the truth of our lived experience than are our ideas about our lived experience.' . . . This is a cumulative insight of grace, elegance and profundity, and it pulls together many of the book's threads in a final chapter entitled "Hope" that soars. For Weinberger, the Web is . . . a way of returning us to our humanity. And it's only in its infancy." "He's on to a major story: this Internet thing is big . . . In weaving a new world within the void of our historical moment, the Web is less a tool than a response, in small pieces, to a wish we'd nearly forgotten we had. For too long, we've been dining on beastly thin cognitive gruel. The Net's unbelievable size, irreducible weirdness and uncontrollable energy reflects how starved we are for the smallest bits of madly inspired life."  ... [more] 1:56:57 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Saturday, March 16, 2002

All the News That's Fit to Blog "Peer groups organize themselves in hundreds of different ways. But what they all have in common is a shared sense of mission: what the military calls 'unit cohesion.' That cohesion -- a kind of network effect -- is what makes the peer group, or team, much stronger than the simple sum of its parts." ... [more] 1:41:53 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, March 12, 2002

"The web place has certain characteristics: It's persistent. It's conversational. It's hyperlinked. The Web geography is shaped by links of human interest and conversation. ... we humans are at our best when we are involved with others." 3:32:04 PM    comment  []

Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg "In the late nineteen-sixties, a Harvard social psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in an effort to find an answer to what is known as the small-world problem, though it could also be called the Lois Weisberg problem. It is this: How are human beings connected? Do we belong to separate worlds, operating simultaneously but autonomously, so that the links between any two people, anywhere in the world, are few and distant? Or are we all bound up together in a grand, interlocking web? " "Proximity overpowered similarity. ... what friends really tend to have in common are activities. We're friends with the people we do things with, not necessarily with the people we resemble. We don't seek out friends; we simply associate with the people who occupy the same physical places that we do ... Six degrees of separation doesn't simply mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those few." "When we say, then, that Lois Weisberg is the kind of person who 'knows everyone,' we mean ... that she belongs to lots of different worlds." "fifty-six per cent of [job-seekers] had found their jobs through a personal connection ... the best way to get in the door is through a personal contact. But the majority of those personal connections ... did not involve close friends. They were what he called "weak ties." ... People were getting their jobs not through their friends but through acquaintances. ... Mere acquaintances ... are much more likely to know something that you don't. ... 'the strength of weak ties.' The most important people in your life are, in certain critical realms, the people who aren't closest to you, and the more people you know who aren't close to you the stronger your position becomes." " ... what matters in getting ahead is not the quality of your relationships but the quantity -- not how close you are to those you know but, paradoxically, how many people you know whom you aren't particularly close to." "The social instinct makes everyone seem like part of a whole, and there is something very appealing about this, because it means that people like Lois aren't bound by the same categories and partitions that defeat the rest of us. This is what the power of the people who know everyone comes down to in the end. It is not -- as much as we would like to believe otherwise -- something rich and complex, some potent mixture of ambition and energy and smarts and vision and insecurity. It's much simpler than that. It's the same lesson they teach in Sunday school. Lois knows lots of people because she likes lots of people. And all those people Lois knows and likes invariably like her, too, because there is nothing more irresistible to a human being than to be unqualifiedly liked by another." ... [more] 3:10:03 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Point and think "The Internet, Weinberger says, 'is unleashing our natural desire to find other people interested in the same things as we are, our group-forming tendencies. The Internet has long passed the point of being a gigantic on-line library where we can track down content that matters to us. [It] is a conversation.'" 2:42:38 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Tuesday, March 05, 2002

That Sneaky Exponential—Beyond Metcalfe's Law to the Power of Community Building by David P. Reed " ... the total value of a communications network grows with the square of the number of devices or people it connects. ... Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, i.e. much more rapidly than Metcalfe's square law. I will call such networks Group-Forming Networks, or GFNs." " ... paying attention to network value is a crucial strategic issue, especially as businesses move their customer and supplier relationships into the 'net. What kind of value are we talking about ... the value of potential connectivity for transactions. ... Potential connectivity to many points should have value proportionally larger, since it is not necessary to use the connection to find value in its availability. The value of potential connectivity is the value of the set of optional transactions that are afforded by the system or network." " ... Group Forming Networks (GFNs) are an important additional kind of network capability. A GFN has functionality that directly enables and supports affiliations (such as interest groups, clubs, meetings, communities) among subsets of its customers. Group tools and technologies ... all have a common theme—they allow small or large groups of network users to coalesce and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal." " ... if there is any portion of the total network value that grows exponentially, scale effects will eventually bring that value to the fore, where it will dominate any other source of value. ... the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from one category to another as the scale of the network increases: "As digital networking brings scale and global reach to all aspects of our lives and activities, there will be many more ways that we'll see scale driven value shifts that threaten established business networking patterns. ... there is a strong correlation between the prosperity of national economies and social capital, which [is defined] culturally as the ease with which people in a particular culture can form new associations. ... As the scale of interaction grows more global via the Internet, isn't it possible that a combination of social capital and GFN capital will drive prosperity to those who recognize the value of network structures that support free and responsible association for common purposes?"  ... [more] ... [more] 11:45:48 AM    comment  []

Saturday, March 02, 2002

Radio UserLand 8.0 Is a Lab for Group-Forming  ... [more] 12:28:36 PM    comment  []

Thursday, February 21, 2002

Weblogs as community ("the art of connecting real people in virtual places") " ... make it a community. What was needed, was a way to connect all these disparate sites and give their users a way to talk back. ... the power of microcontent to promote connection on the web. ... people talking about their lives and interests ... and we have a web of connections between them. ... to achieve a real community feel ... let the readers of each site talk back." " ... all the pieces of a virtual community: ... users who have the tools to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming [renewing?] intimate relationships over time ... further evolution of this idea is group weblogs, where multiple authors are brought together to post on the same site, unified by a common interest [or shared experience?] ... " " ... multitude of separate sites. ... this multitude that gives the weblog community model its strength. Because each user has control over their own piece of the community landscape, they feel a powerful ownership of their space ... In this way, it's the same as a real life neighborhood – each participant has their own space, their home, where they can feel safe, yet they are also a part of a larger community, the neighborhood." " ... the future of online community – a future where everyone has a home of their own, a place where they have control, a private space in an ever-more-complicated virtual community sphere." ... [more] 3:53:50 PM    comment  []