Building new communities - learning from weblogs

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Building new communities - learning from weblogs
Building new communities - learning from weblogs

• How weblogs straddle personal and social spaces
  and the potential implications for developing new
  communities
• Version 1.0 / 19th June 2002
• Tom Coates plasticbag.org

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What is an online community?

• Were all familiar with online communities 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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Centralised Communities

• Were used to this model of communities -
  centralised spaces in which people come and
  participate.
• People who visit these spaces might be able to
  modify their experience of the place, but the
  spaces are financially and culturally owned and
  run by people in power.

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Centralised Communities

• The word used for people participating in these
  communities is generally users, occasionally
  visitors, but infrequently citizens and
  almost never owners. Their real life equivalent
  is the town hall, the pub, or all too often the
  youth club

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Centralised weblog communities

• There are many communities of this type built
  around the concept of the weblog as well. But
  while these group weblogs have extended some of
  the functionality of the normal discussion board

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Centralised weblog 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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And what Im hoping to answer today?

• Is there a community of webloggers?
• How did this community emerge?
• Why has it been so successful?
• 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
quotation is so true and so useful

• 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 Joined
  (Perseus 2002, p. 177)

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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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Weblog tools and stats
Weblog applications transformed personal
publishing by automating many of the less
interesting jobs. Publishing to a weblog suddenly
only involved typing in your comments and
pressing a publish button - from there - like any
other CMS, the content was inserted into
templates and FTP-ed to a server. Applications
include centralised ones like Blogger, pitas.com
and software you install on your own server like
Greymatter and Moveable Type. Over 1,000,000
weblogs have been created to date although how
many are regularly updated is unknown
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But where is the weblog community?

• After all the vast majority of weblogs are
  maintained by individuals.
• Weblogs usually contain content developed by
  those individuals.
• Are weblogs therefore nothing but 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
• I got around fifty replies

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 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 friends or family-members sites.

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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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One example

• Again from my survey
• 1) Where did you first hear about weblogs?
• There was this site that I used to go to, in
  order to keep abreast of certain goings on in
  the world of comics. One day, I noticed that it
  had become a web log. Everything else, I found
  by links from that.
• 2) What made you decide to start your own weblog?
  
• The realisation that I was travelling through
  South East Asia, mainly with a computer, and that
  this was an easy way of letting my family know I
  was out of town without writing to tell them
  about it individually.

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One example

• This represents quite a leap
• From reading a specific site about a specific
  subject, the reader began to recognise the format
  weblog
• They moved from reading sites maintained by a
  specific interest group to reading sites from
  several different interest groups through link
  panels, via links and explicit references.
• When he decided to travel, he recognised the
  format as something good for helping to maintain
  a radically different site that would maintain
  relationships with friends and family and help
  him talk about the experience.
• This story was far from unique despite
  completely changing context and subject matter,
  the idea of writing a weblog seems to spread like
  wildfire

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Question

• Weve seen the directions along which weblogging
  spreads virally - both travelling through
  communities and forming new ones as it spreads.
• But knowing how theyre spread doesnt tell us
  why theyre spread so quickly. What is it about
  weblogs that makes them so compelling?

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Answer

• People

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Identification with the people

• People enjoy reading about other people
  (voyeurism)
• Weblogs make it easy to get up to date
  information about people, friends, situation or
  interest.
• People who read weblogs can quickly determine
  that a weblog is almost always not about an issue
  but about a persons interest in an issue or
  issues.
• People feel that they can identify with the
  person behind the weblog - which makes their
  content more compelling.
• People identify with them - at least in part - on
  the basis of they are like me or occasionally
  aspirationally - I wish I was like them.
• People perceive that running a weblog is not a
  particularly difficult thing to do - since they
  can identify with the very real normal people who
  do it.
• And theyre right - because barriers to entry are
  very low

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So lets go back to that quotation

• 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 Joined
  (Perseus 2002, p. 177)

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The public and personal haved merged

• Weve been building communities centralised
  communities that are like town squares or pubs
  or youth clubs.
• But the lines between public and personal
  online are becoming very fuzzy indeed.
• The explosion of interest in weblogging points us
  towards ways to make our sites work less like
  communal spaces (youth clubs and town squares)
  and more like actual real-life communities

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The lessons

• Individuals like their opinions to be heard
• Individuals dont want the work they put into the
  web to disappear they want to be able to show
  it to people.
• Individuals like control over their local
  environment and want to show off their
  creativity.
• Individuals dont identify with sites anywhere
  near as much as they identify with other people.
• Individuals will be creative if given a medium
  which makes it easy to be so.
• Individuals are prepared and intelligent enough
  to adapt easy-to-use functionality to a wide
  variety of uses.

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And most importantly and counter intuitively

• The best, the strongest, the most creative
  communities can emerge out of the interconnected
  nature of individual spaces.
• Making great communities is about celebrating
  the individuals within them - giving them spaces
  that they can use to show off their creativity
  and passions
• And in return these individuals will themselves
  build a vibrant, creative and passionate
  community

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Some relevant sites

• B3ta.com
• - A community that creates funny animations,
  jokes etc.
• - If you make something particularly good it
  will be placed on your profile page forever. This
  way you can show off your work
• Epinions.com
• - Individuals review consumer / entertainment
  products.
• - Every individual has a home page which lists
  all the reviews theyve written - all the
  creative work theyve done. They are given a
  certain amount of flexibility to form
  relationships between each other as well.
• Habbohotel.com
• - Avatar-based flash hotel community.
• - A good proportion of the conversation happens
  in private rooms - which are relatively
  undefined. You can decide the shape of the rooms,
  the décor, buy furniture, only allow in certain
  numbers of friends. The centralised space is for
  the naïve users

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Building new communities - learning from weblogs
Building new communities - learning from weblogs

• E-mail me tom_at_plasticbag.org

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Thanks to

• Meg_at_notsosoft.com
• Dave_at_brainsluice.com
• Jason_at_kottke.org
• Meg_at_megnut.com
• Bart_at_trabaca.com
• Matt_at_blackbeltjones.com
• Sparky_at_ultrasparky.org
• Alan_at_Cyberpumpkin.com
• Matt_at_interconnected.org
• Matt_at_haughey.com
• Mo_at_momorgan.com
• And all the people who took part in the survey