Cost of Centralized Communities Jon Udell on the future of online community: ...This WebX thing is not working for me. It's not simply that the software mangles URLs, doesn't preview messages, and handles topics and threads in a way I find awkward. What's broken, for me, is the idea that an online community is a place where people gather, and a centralized repository of the discussions held in that place. In that model, I've concluded, the costs are just too high. It's expensive to join. It's expensive to participate, because interactive discussion demands a lot of attention. And it's expensive to leave, because the repository has your data, and may or may not (probably won't) preserve its linkable namespace or hand the data back to you in a reasonable form....
Of course there are, and will continue to be, vibrant and successful newsgroups and discussion forums. But I'm convinced that destination sites and centralized message stores are not the future of online community. Blogs are. They solve a bunch of problems. They also create a few new ones, but these feel like really good problems to tackle. As Bruce implies with his comment about work dynamics, ad-hoc assembly and loose coupling will increasingly characterize both social and technical architectures. I'm done debating how to display discussion threads. I want to figure out where this new stuff is going.
John McDowall on the future impact of online community: Where does technology help form communities and when does it get in the way. Jon's take on WebX is that it was getting in the way, of creating a community. Blogs are much easier but need some way of providing feedback more like threaded discussions. To create social networks that can exerts political pressure it is necessary to bind them together to exert the collective will. This binding may be very transient but to impact any political process it must exist.
Also, John with an H continues to evolve his interactive graph tool.
11:12:36 AM 
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