Building new communities learning from weblogs

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Building new communities - learning from weblogs

• How weblogs straddle personal and social spaces
  and the potential implications for developing new
  communities

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Definitions of weblogs?
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The reason people have trouble defining weblogs
is that there are so many different types of them.
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So what Im hoping to answer today is

• 1) Is there a community of webloggers?
• 2) How did this community emerge?
• 3) Why has it been so successful?
• 4) What lessons we can learn from weblogs and
  weblog culture when we try and build new
  communities?

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And in the process I hope to explain why this
quote is so true - and why we should be thinking
in these terms when we work elsewhere?
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The web teaches us that we can be part of the
largest public ever assembled and still maintain
our individual faces. But this requires living
more of our life in public. On the Web, the
notion of a diary has been turned inside out
weblogs are public diaries. It is likely that the
neat line we draw between our public and private
selves in the real world will continue to erode,
grain by grain David Weinberger, Small Pieces
Loosely Joinedm Perseus 2002 p. 177.
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So why on earth would we even think of weblogging
as a communal enterprise?

• After all the vast majority of weblogs are
  maintained by individuals.
• They for the largest part contain content only
  developed by those individuals.
• Is this not - in essence - a very low-power
  broadcast medium?

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Well lets look at some of the evidence

• Mutual links between individuals
• Web rings

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How do people become webloggers?

• If we look to how people become webloggers we can
  see one part of the origins of this sense of
  emerged community

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QUOTES ABOUT WHY PEOPLE BECAME WEBLOGGERS
There was this site that I used to go to, in
order to keep abreast ofcertain goings on in the
world of comics. One day, I noticed that ithad
become a web log. Everything else, I found by
links from that What made you start a weblog? The
realisation that I was travelling through South
East Asia, mainlywith a computer, and that this
was an easy way of letting my family knowI was
out of town without writing to tell them about it
individually.
I vaguely recall looking forsomething on Google,
and it pointed to not.so.soft. Found what I was
lookingfor, looked around a bit more, and liked
the look of the whole onlinejournal idea.
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The rapid uptake of weblogs, therefore, isnt
just because of media coverage, but instead
because of inspiration by people who already
maintain them.

• THIS MEANS
• That there is some kind of attraction to READING
  weblogs that means that people continue to do so.
• That the individuals who are doing the weblogging
  seem to be very real to the people reading them,
  and act as some kind of inspiration.
• That there is something obviously interesting
  about weblogging as a phenomenon that inspires a
  I could do that kind of ethos.
• That the barriers to entry in terms of doing it
  are very low.

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Why the hell has weblogging become so popular?
What needs does it fulfil?

• I had a considerable sense of the various urges
  that make people become webloggers, but rather
  than simply guess, I did what I would always do
  in these circumstances - I posted a request to my
  site

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So what CAN we learn from weblogs?

• The counter intuitive - a community can emerge
  more successfully out of interconnected spaces
  that are HIGHLY personal and individual.
• That individuals like their opinions to be heard
  and not lost - which is why more comments are
  posted as part of the weblog community than
  perhaps any other community on the planet.
• People like control over their local environment
  and want to show off their creativity.
• People can be part of various different
  communities based around a wide-variety of
  different criteria and these can overlaps.
• People like to have their opinions heard and
  registered
• Viral take-up based around connections with the
  individuals.
• Low barriers to entry.