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Building new communities - learning from weblogs

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Title: Building new communities - learning from weblogs


1
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

2
What is an online community?
  • Were all familiar with online communities like

3
Community bbc chat boards
A huge number of simple threaded message boards
and java chat rooms.
4
Community popbitch.com
Ludicrously badly behaved and incredibly active
discussion board
5
Community barbelith.com
Threaded discussion forum, 1000 members, private
messaging
6
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.

7
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

8
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

9
Centralised weblog communities
  • these are not sites that Im going to be talking
    about today
  • Metafilter.com
  • Plastic.com
  • Slashdot.org

10
Im going to be talking about sites like..
  • Content

Ultrasparky.org Run by Dan Rhatigan, a New-Yorker
in his thirties.
11
Im going to be talking about sites like..
  • Content

kottke.org Run by Jason Kottke, a designer and
web guru in San Francisco.
12
Im going to be talking about sites like..
  • Content

Trabaca.com Run by a young man getting used to
the idea of being gay.
13
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?

14
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)

15
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

16
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).

17
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
18
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?

19
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

20
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.
21
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.
22
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.
23
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
24
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.
25
The three main communities
26
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.

27
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.

28
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.

29
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

30
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?

31
Answer
  • People

32
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

33
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)

34
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

35
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.

36
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

37
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

38
Building new communities - learning from weblogs
Building new communities - learning from weblogs
  • E-mail me tom_at_plasticbag.org

39
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
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