BLOGSAVVY

Reading a post by D’Arcy Norman expounding (a bit) on the global community of edubloggers that Josie Fraser is illustrating through her rather nifty use of the mapping tool Frappr got me thinking about how perhaps the massive globalisation of our communities through blogs might in fact be creating far more local communities than we already have.

Put it this way, existing pre-web and to a large degree pre-blog our communities were generally made up of people geographically close to us. Yes, there have always been conferences and yes there have, in an academic sense at least, always been journals and alike but essentially our day to day communities were the people we work and socialise with. In fact, the development of listservs, newsgroups and alike didn’t necessarily change this to any great degree, we were still essentially part of a particular group which we had joined and our communities were people in that group.

Continue reading Are global communities more local than we might expect?

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The Antipodean points to an article in the Age in which:

“Federal Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull has called for the Government to give every Australian their own email address for life.”

Sometimes being an Aussie can be a tad frustrating…

I mean, I think it was a year and a half ago that the NSW govt splashed out $84 million on providing every frickin school with email.

This really has to stop.

For the same amount of money the government could provide every single Australian with their own fully featured Content Management System / Blog.

We have the tools and the hardware costs would be the same (or a lot less).

Imagine it, every resident could have their own area, their own digital space and voice… they could be geospatially aggregated in community contexts… multiple voices, platforms and audiences.

Bloody hell, using the global categories function in WPMU you could even have communities of interest in a city, let alone a neighbourhood. Whack in the tagging that Bud is also incorporating alongside WPMU and your folksonomy is your community.

What a brilliant public service!

Please somebody, anybody, hire me to make this happen!

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So following on from my ideas about relocation and the internet big bang, I’m trying out a little bit of a project.

WordPress MultiUser has, IMO, about the greatest organisational / social potential of any application since email. Yes, there are lots of different multi-user blog options and yes, many of these are pretty powerful… but the thing about WPMU is that it leverages the developing digital identity / CMS aspects of WordPress (with no real interference) and in doing so sets us up for the development of blogging beyond simply a publication format.

That is, blogs as digital identity / genuine social networking applications / personal content management systems and a heck of a lot more.

And, if you follow the big bang theory to it’s natural conclusion… quite possibly physically located.

Which is why, as a little trial, I’ve snapped up melbourneblogs.org, sydneyblogs.org, brisbaneblogs.org, londonblogs.org and newyorkblogs.org.

Continue reading Cityblogs - WPMU & developing blogging communities based on physical / spatial relationships

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A while back I had a bit of a vision of what the internet is going to (perhaps) become.

Now, I’m certainly no futurist so feel free to take this as large pinch of salt as is required, but I think that I’m onto something when I was talking about neighbourspheres.

The internet (bar it’s very early existence) is a phenomenon that started in a distributed and, to a degree, global manner. Online locations have usually been defined by ideas and concepts rather than physical matter which, while revolutionising communication, information & culture has lead to what Mejias calls a degree of distancelessness (rather than the closeness that we experience in our physical environments).

This is a problem and a tension and in resolving itself I think we are going to see the physical relocation of the internet and blogs and the emerging forms of digital identity they provide forming the basis of this.

I reckon that this is going to be chacterised by the internet big bang.

Continue reading The internet big bang - how blogs will relocate the internet - Part 1

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A lot of free blogging ’spaces’ have sprung up since back in the day and an interesting way of looking at them is to see what communities they support (or don’t). For example, Blogger supports no particular community which LiveJournal supports an obviously more specific community as does Blogdrive.

Of particular interest though is that the communities here are invariably communities of age, backgrounds & interest. That is, there’s very little beyond a few web-rings or subdivisions of popular blog sites (examples taken from webring & Xanga) and this isn’t really much use if you’re looking for ways in which you can get conversations & communities together in a physical sense… which, with our increasingly wired & interconnected neighbourhoods could be the next big thing (and not just because of the obvious potential ad revenue!)

There are two ways that I’d approach this. The first one being the ‘Hub‘ approach and the second being the ‘Hubris‘.

>> Continue reading Creating and sustaining a local blogging community - hubs, hubris & your neighboursphere

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