Last night in my little town of 2,800 souls, the Kingston Inn burned to the ground. Neighbors, restaurant employees and friends I didn’t know I had watched, dazed. The community traded stories and gave thanks that everyone made it out alive. Someone said, “Being Kingston, you know there will be a fundraiser for employees.” In my nerd-o-licious mind, “community” meant “blog,” “coffee shop,” “school” or “forum.” Mental note: spend more time in the physical world. I also thought back to this week’s Mediapost article about blogs as community-builders: blogs do community better than it’s ever been done before.
The Web has indulged in blog-like behavior since the beginning of Internet time. To link is to connect. To connect is to inspire response. A tweak here and an interface there and free, static “community” web spaces began to share buzz with the likes of Blogger.
During the last US presidential race, election blogs were a buzz-worthy curiosity. Today election blogs are an international phenomenon. Then came tsunami blogs, Katrina blogs, business blog seminars and blogs mentioned on network TV news. Links to blogs and forums have appeared on CBS.com, The Washington Post, ABC News, Yahoo News, MSNBC and The New York Times.
I believe it’s no coincidence that this evolved after the Cold War and during an era of sea changes in internationally significant issues. We are witnessing tumultuous shifts in world trade, international terrorism and wide-reaching philosophical debates. We need to understand each other, to make sense of what is burning down, built up or offered for sale. The Web’s world-wide reach encourages development of user-friendly tools that have international reach: email; search engines; forums; blogs and increasingly RSS.
Technorati estimated that there are 14.2 million blogs, 1 new blog a second. In a recent poll, 54% of bloggers stated that they “like to share thoughts and feelings with others.”
So, what’s “community?” Far from impersonal link drops, the signature lines of forum members’ blogs like The Other Bloke’s Blog, the Cre8pc SEO and Usability Blog and Good News Blog deepen our understanding of the approach of real people behind online contributions. Cre8asite members give personal attention to Website Hospital threads examining design, usability and SEO practices. We see international, personal conversation about topics as wide as design principles or building an online resource about New Jersey. As one restaurant burns to the ground, our international community enjoys a draft for another’s new web site.
Right on. The Internet has certainly changed the nature of connections. I think also the real user-friendliness of blogging software means that more people can express their views. You can even e-mail in your posts to a Blogger blog now.
What that means is that more people can express their views. Before it was only the real enthusiasts who would put in the effort to find a place where they could let the world know what they felt. So it was the extremists at the ends of any social scale who tended to define the discussions. Now it’s much easier for those “in the middle” to just blog about something and for others “in the middle” to get in touch and get some interaction going. That all leads to much better communities developing, I believe.
Comment by BWelford — September 22, 2005 @ 5:58 am