BLOGSAVVY

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‘.

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In a hub you have an opportunity for each resident in a particular area to share information, events, opinion and resources on a single site. Urban Vancouver as does Malaysia Net and other citizen Journalist sites. This is great when you’re trying to get people together but has a couple of problems:

1. You’re asking people to participate in environments in which they don’t have a stake / ownership. I’ve written about this in Centred Communication and it can create a lot of participatory problems even though it can also be a lot easier of the set-up.

2. This just doesn’t scale on a grand level… all you need is moderate success (which might be difficult given the first point) and things go badly awry.

3. These communities are a hotbed for flaming, stress an angst… blogs & hubris is not (but more on that in another post!)

(this isn’t, of course, to say that there isn’t a place fro these or that they can’t be successful in particular contexts - as the often are - just that there is often a better / alternative model…)

I’ve taken hubris in a tongue-in-cheek fashion from the definition of it as ‘a boastful comparison of the self to the divine’… that the most important thing is the people involved. While in a hub, the space in which the community exists is paramount, in hubris it is the individuals (not just the ones that think the world of themselves though :o) who matter.

While the hub model of online communities has each person coming to one place, the hubris approach has each participant secure in their own space and the ‘centre’ simply being an administrative / aggregation portal to these different spaces. Through the portal context each user is able to find relevant users to themselves and aggregate individually each of them. In essence you have a blogosphere… just right on your doorstep.

Naturally there are a few significant challenges with this model, not leastso that participation as an individual is more difficult (although becoming easier) than as a collective author. Indeed, the concept of having a ‘blogspace’ in anything other than a ‘journal’ form is still a fair way off and we’re only touching the tip of what the internet is going to do to the society around us.

However, with the added advantage of this model offering new blogs, and being able to simply involve existing blogs or blogs from other services and the fact that the quicker those in your community start publishing, the smarter (very quickly) those around them will get… it might not be long before your neighboursphere is a pretty common concept.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2005 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Blogging for Community, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.