Comments on: Online communities

By: Crooked Timber » » A great resource

Crooked Timber » » A great resource — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 23:05:59 +0000

[...] As I noted in my post a few years ago, I hope there are people studying communities like this. There seems to be quite a bit of work, for example, on the free/open source community. There is also quite a bit of work on various online communities. But I have seen little scholarship (granted, I have not looked actively) about studies of online communities that provide so much tangible value for free to active members and outsiders alike. [...]

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 17:22:36 +0000

I sort of assume that everyone knows about the "online, edited collection" Into the Blogosphere. But I also sort of don't, since you can't be sure with online, edited collections. (An important service intermediaries like bookshops ("bookstores") serve for me is to tell me what's new without me having to have my ear to the word of ground's mouth.)

By: eszter

eszter — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 00:06:57 +0000

Many mailing lists have moderators who will filter messages to the list so it’s incorrect to think that all mailing lists are just a complete free-for-all.

By: CalGal

CalGal — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 22:59:31 +0000

Blogging is distinct from usenet because, as Clay Shirky points out, blogging is broadcasting, not community. One person (or persons) is the owner; the commenters are just the audience. Blogs are far easier to manage than forums, and that’s a perfectly good reason to choose them. But bloggers should never fool themselves. Weblogs aren’t the equivalent of online communities. Bloggers have admirers and detractors, and whenever the comments get out of hand, the owners stop the comments. That’s why most major bloggers discontinue comments or never allowed them to begin with.

By: lady c

lady c — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 08:11:15 +0000

Most of the things I’ve seen about the blogosphere focus on the bloggers, who’s popular and why, not the readers/commenters or the mechanisms for creating community. Sometimes the bloggers themselves discuss their participation rules or controls, or why they don’t have comments, but generally these are from the view of the single blog, and the blogger/host, rather than commenter communities or what makes for different types of reader/commenter experiences. So Usenet experiences might be of interest. Nonetheless, blogging remains very distinct from Usenet because the blogger makes such a difference, not only in attracting readers via “voice” and selecting topics and content. The blogger affects participant interaction via language style, use of humor, freqeuncy and “news”-ness of posts, rythmn, whether there are comments, whether conversation is monitored, how links are used, whether dialog with other blogs is common, whether supplemental features are part of the site, navigation tools, and aesthetics. Yet its interactive nature makes the blog much more than just the product of the blogger, unlike a passive website or magazine published electronicly (even if it has a “forum”). It’s more like night clubs, where the crowd is as important as the physical setup, music, food or drinks. And word-of-mouth is more important than formal advertising. I’m curious whether anyone has tried to produce a preliminary “typology” of blogs based on the various permutations of blog-comments-links mechanisms to try to sort out some of these dynamics.

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 08:07:07 +0000

Phillip Greenspun wrote his MIT ph.d on the subject. He’s something of crank, but he’s got a lot of experience. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/.

By: degustibus

degustibus — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 07:58:09 +0000

“A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless association of human beings.”—Kurt Vonnegut :: who must have been talking about fans, Hoosiers, (presciently about) Netizens, online communities…..