On superdistributed and

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Whats next?

• On super-distributed and
• super-localised online communities
• Tom Coates plasticbag.org

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Introduction

• Ive been invited to talk about distributed
  communities online. In the language of this
  conference, this seems to mean, essentially, a
  geographically distributed community interacting
  (mainly) through a centralised service or site

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Introduction

• We might take that kind of interaction almost for
  granted now, but its worth examining the kind of
  things that make the internet uniquely useful for
  that kind of enterprise.. After all, it may sound
  ridiculous, but conference calling also allows
  people to connect together in a group without
  regard for geography. What makes a distributed
  community on the internet different from a
  conference call?

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What the internet provides?

• Geography not necessarily a structuring principle
• Creation of online semi-permanentt places where
  a group can gather
• The ability to find / discover other communities
  and join in with them
• A mediated relationship to identity - degrees of
  anonymity are possible, and built into the
  (lack-of?) architecture

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What the internet provides

• Also, the internet provides a re-conceptualisation
  of a community in time
• ASYNCHRONY is an almost unique feature of the
  internets version of interaction and perhaps its
  most important.
• There are many forms of anline asynchronous
  communication - even instant messaging is
  really just super-fast asynchrony. If I go to the
  fridge for a beer and then come back, I still
  receive messages people had sent to me while I
  was gone. And I can answer immediately or ten
  minutes later

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What the internet provides

• Message boards, bulletin boards and mailing lists
  are the best current expressions of asynchrony
• The volume of traffic for a conversation becomes
  less important (one person can comment a day and
  its still useful), theres no longer any need to
  be online concurrently to talk or discuss, you
  dont have to be in the same time-zone or even
  continent, discussions can last hours, days,
  weeks, months, years and still be useful, theyre
  easily (often inevitably) archivable as well

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Why am I reminding you of this?

• We have to keep things like asynchrony and
  community discovery in mind because we're so
  close to the origins of the internet. We're still
  searching for things that are 'true to the
  medium', and moreover, we're still trying to find
  out what being 'true to the medium' even means in
  this context

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Example Five years of underwear gnomes

• The web has been about web publishing for five
  years now. Heres a sample business plan from
  the period
• Put all of our content online to the extent
  that we are the only people worth going to to
  find out about a particular subject - say
  trees.
• ?
• Profit

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But five/ten years earlier..

• What was the internet used for?
• IRC, E-mail, Bulletin boards, message boards,
  Instant messaging, Usenet, mailing lists, MUDs,
  MOOs, MUSHes etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
• INTERACTION BETWEEN PEOPLE

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True to the medium?

• I think were seeing a resurgence of interest in
  building around these principles because its one
  the things that the internet is best at -
  dislocating conversation from a dependence on
  geography and time, making communities visible
  and possible for people to engage with Just
  remember - just because you can do all these
  things doesnt meant that you can only build
  anonymous, long-distance, time-shifted, visible
  communities Hopefully Ill show some of the
  movements past these simple models later

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Back to distributed communities

• With all this in mind, I want to push slightly
  past the model of distributed communities that
  are based on these principles of centralised
  points online for distributed geographic
  communities.
• I want to talk about some of the stuff thats
  illuminating whats next

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Im going to talk about

• The kind of communities that are emerging between
  weblogs and webloggers - which are not only
  radically geographically dislocated but dont
  even share a single online space.
• Im going to call this a (because its cool) a
  SUPERDISTRIBUTED COMMUNITY

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Im going to talk about

• 2) Im also going to talk briefly about the work
  we did on UpMyStreet Conversations, and how
  (ironically) patterns of technology designed to
  support interest groups online are now being
  collapsed back down onto geography. Im going to
  call this a radical SUPERLOCALISED COMMUNITY

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Important!!!

• At no point am I suggesting that any one of
  these emerging kinds of communities is going to
  result in the death of earlier paradigms. No
  doubt well see a replacement for the
  messageboard at some point, but at the moment,
  these models are complements to whats already
  there - designed to support different kinds of
  interactions between people with different goals
  and desires

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Right then

• Were all familiar with sites like

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Community bbc chat boards
A huge number of simple threaded message boards
and java chat rooms.
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Community popbitch.com
Ludicrously badly behaved and incredibly active
discussion board
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Community barbelith.com
Threaded discussion forum, 1000 members, private
messaging
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Distributed communities

• Im not going to be talking about those kinds of
  communities - Im going to be talking about the
  kind of communities that have emerged around and
  in-between weblogs

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Distributed communities

• But I have to be more specific - there are online
  communities which look like weblogs, but are
  still basically individual sites that host
  conversations

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Distributed communities

• these are not sites that Im going to be talking
  about today

• Metafilter.com

• Plastic.com

• Slashdot.org

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Im going to be talking about sites like..

• Content

Ultrasparky.org Run by Dan Rhatigan, a New-Yorker
in his thirties.
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Im going to be talking about sites like..

• Content

kottke.org Run by Jason Kottke, a designer and
web guru in San Francisco.
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Im going to be talking about sites like..

• Content

Trabaca.com Run by a young man getting used to
the idea of being gay.
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But what exactly is a weblog?

• Meg from notsosoft.com asked Google this
  question And it said that weblogs are

• a Natural for Librarians
• ... probably the next logical evolution of print
  zines, and zines are always nice
• ... the new Borg.
• ... my friend!
• ... just lists of short blurbs documenting
  pedestrian events in the writer's life, usually
  with links to other pages the author finds
  interesting.
• ... journalism for the future.
• ... destined to become a powerful, dirt-cheap
  tool for e-learning
• ... what some would call the Web's equivalent of
  a sophisticated early warning radar system.
• ... a GAL's best friend!

• ... also often called a news page.
• ... "useful" because they enable informational
  sorting and distribution.
• ... mostly used to broadcast information.
• ... a learning tool.
• ... gut-simple to set up.
• ... mostly personal diaries. ...
• ... a form of communication hitherto unknown.
• ... so bad
• ... almost as old as the web
• ... quick and easy to publish
• ... updated often and may contain profanity

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But what exactly is a weblog?

• For our purposes today, a weblog is
• A site maintained by an individual.
• Regularly updated.
• Organised in a newest writings at the top style
  chronology.
• Often run using a tool that automates the process
  of posting (cheap / free low-grade CMS).

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But where is the weblog community?

• 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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Evidence for the community

• Links panels (webloggers favourite weblogs) -
  one-way vs two-way / blogrolling.
• Specific site mentions.
• Referencing the source of good links - the via
  phenomenon - a mark of respect and courtesy
• Weblog web-rings (BoyLogs)
• Weblog mailing lists (ukbloggers)
• Comments facilities
• Mailto / AIM names / Voicemail
• Centralised sites and portals
• Daypop.com
• Blogdex.media.mit.edu
• Eatonweb.com

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How did this community form?

• On plasticbag.org I decided to ask people where
  they first had heard about weblogging and what
  made them decide to try it for themselves

In Holland (where Im from) there was a guy doing
funny things with a weblog. I liked it, checked
Blogger and 1.5 hours later I had my own weblog
I was familiar with online journals/diaries
before weblogs,stumbling across one quite by
accident in 1998 and being fascinated by it -
fascinated by the fact that someone would write
about their life and just stick it on the
internet -it seemed a (weirdly) selfless thing to
do (I can't explain that).
I didn't much care if anyone read it, but I
liked the idea that I could access it from just
about anywhere and didn't have to worry about
"losing" it.
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Weblogs build relationships
The red dots in this diagram represent people
some with weblogs, some without. The figure in
the middle starts a weblog and starts talking
about his life or about something that
specifically interests him.
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Weblogs build relationships
Gradually he starts to link to weblogs that he
shares an interest with and if hes producing
interesting content in turn, will get linked to
in return. He begins a dialogue with some of
these people, becoming part of one or more
overlapping Communities of Interest.
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Weblogs build relationships
Over time he may introduce friends and family to
some of the sites that he has seen or tell them
about the site that he is running bringing an
already existing community in contact with
weblogs in general, and his own weblog in
particular. Some in turn may start weblogs of
their own
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Weblogs build relationships
Because of the personal diarist nature of
weblogging, people often feel engaged enough with
someone to be interested in meeting them in the
flesh these meetings often involve meeting in
turn other people geographically nearby whose
interest groups may be connected by a mutual
weblogging friend to yours.
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The three main communities
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Overlapping communities

• In the example we saw the weblogger participate
  in three types of community
• Communities of people sharing similar interests
  to him- or herself, whose weblogs they read or
  are read by. They are likely to be a member of
  multiple, overlapping interest communities.
• A community of people located nearby
  geographically who are also invested in the
  medium, even though they may not be in the same
  interest groups.
• A pre-existing community of friends and family
  who may become interested in the medium because
  of their friend / family-members use of it.

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Weblogs spread virally

• Each one of these axes is not only a community
  that the weblogger belongs to, but also one of
  the directions in which the idea of starting a
  weblog can spread.

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Super-distributed communities

• Craig Brown described the audience for newspaper
  columns as "that diminishing minority of people
  who do not write newspaper columns
• Weblogs are mostly read by other webloggers.
  This is not a problem, its a mark that weblogs
  are more than broadcast, and instead are a form
  of community

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Super-distributed communities

• The weblog world is a super-distributed
  community where - much like newspaper columnists
  - there are ongoing and involved discussions and
  conversations happening NOT ON ONE SITE - but
  distributed across many hundreds of thousands of
  sites, each one radically personalised - a
  representation of its creator in cyberspace

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Super-distributed communities

• Weblogs also have a lot of similarities to
  academic citation networks that more individually
  site-based communities (message boards) dont
• The content that is linked to is seen much more
  than the stuff that isnt. Serious discussion,
  when it occurs, follows a kind of super-fast
  academic model that I call micro-paradigm
  shifts.
• Heres a diagram that illustrates the difference
  between conversation on a message board and the
  super-distributed community of weblogs

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Super-distributed communities

• And this is where all the text goes

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Super-distributed communities

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Super-localised communities

• Some people have been arguing recently that
  virtual community is dead - that the experience
  of the distributed interest group is the wrong
  way to go and instead we should be looking
  towards using social software to mediate between
  people we already basically know

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Super-localised communities

• Here are a few obvious reasons why thats wrong
• Gay teenagers looking for someone to talk to,
  people suffering from alcoholism, the physically
  disabled, people with addictions or mental health
  problems or prostate cancer or anxieties about
  pregnancy or teen health issues or blood
  disorders etc. etc. etc

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Super localised communities

• Nonetheless, Social Software that supports
  interactions between people you already know or
  people who live near you is coming into its own

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Super-localised communities
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Super-localised communities

• What is Conversations?
• Geocoded Message board
• Every threaded conversation has a specific
  geographical location.
• Designed to help you meet you neighbours and
  discuss local issues.

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Walkthrough

• 1) You locate yourself by typing in a postcode

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Walkthrough

• 2) when you start a conversation in that postcode
  its like putting a flag in the ground.

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Walkthrough

• 3) people in neighbouring areas see their nearest
  conversations

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Super-localised communities

• What kinds of conversations are people having?
• Organising real-world social events
• Information Gathering about other areas
• Organising and debating local politics
• Debating national interests with their local
  communities.

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Super-localised communities

• Why are local communities online important?
• Replacement of village hall or localised
  community spaces
• Possibility of discovery of shared issues and
  things to care about
• The invisible membrane between us and our
  neighbours
• Non-intrusive/ non-threatening, mediated and
  anonymous ways of meeting new people
• Social capital - decline in participation in
  clubs / societies etc. etc. (Robert Putnam,
  Bowling Alone)

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Super-localised communities

• Why now?
• The online discussion of real-world stuff is not
  new There are loads of implementations of
  discussion that serve these purposes
• The concept of location-aware content or geocoded
  content isnt new either, although it is coming
  into its own now
• But in order to pull those two things together,
  you need UBIQUITY

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Super-localised communities

• Ubiquity
• Internet enabled devices are pretty much
  everywhere now. Substantially over 50 of homes
  in the country have internet-enabled computers,
• Over 90 have mobile phones, and fairly soon
  those phones will all be internet-enabled (even
  if people arent necessarily aware of that).
• 3G phones / Wifi / PDAs / Tablet computing /
  hotspots
• The internet is no longer niche, nor is it
  restricted to peoples studies or sitting rooms

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Super-localised communities

• It is now possible for every grouping, from a
  Girl Scout troop on up, to have an online
  component, and for it to be lightweight and easy
  to manage. And that's a different kind of thing
  than the old pattern of "online community." I
  have this image of two hula hoops, the old
  two-hula hoop world, where my real life is over
  here, and my online life is over there, and there
  wasn't much overlap between them. If the hula
  hoops are swung together, and everyone who's
  offline is also online, at least from my point of
  view, that's a different kind of pattern. There's
  a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind
  we're enjoying here thanks to Wifi. If you assume
  whenever a group of people are gathered together,
  that they can be both face to face and online at
  the same time, you can start to do different
  kinds of things. I now don't run a meeting
  without either having a chat room or a wiki up
  and running. Clay Shirky

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Final words

• Our software has been built upon the reification
  of groups - the spaces we have created have been
  spaces built for groups of people to inhabit.
• Now we can start looking elsewhere - models are
  emerging that allow us to build thing for the
  individual and have them form their own community
  spaces. Models are also emerging that put
  different contexts front and centre.
• Very exciting!

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• THE END