Last week I was running through my normal RSS/blog reads. Hit the social media blogs. Hit the advertising blogs. Hit the youth culture blogs. Hit the community focused blogs. Wait. There aren't any. Or more correctly there aren't many.
I talked to a couple of friends about this and received a couple of really good recommendations and found a couple of others that I will link to at the end here. But what am I talking about? If you go back to communities 2.0, (I would argue that Usenet and BBS systems were probably virtual communities 1.0) there was a lot of excitement and interest around Geocities and iVillage and the like. With the flameout of the advertising market there was in my opinion a vast discrediting of the community space as large ugly noisy places with lots of people and no business models to speak of.
Fast forward to today (Community 3.0) and you have the monsters of the community space in the likeness of MySpace, Xanga, Live Journal in the youth market in addition to the various online gaming communities around Warcraft, Everquest, etc. What I don't really see though are the serious discussions about how communities form, or how do communities govern themselves, or what are the different types of members of communities etc. etc.
I am sure there is more out there than I am finding but in general see a lack of concentrated thought and discussion on some of the more academic or cerebral parts around a community. My obvious fascination grows out of my past experience watching a large artist community at MP3.com and my current experience watching the fledgling community on Rabble where the most interesting commonality is that it is generally an entirely mobile phone based community.
Maybe Dana Boyd will be taking on this subject in the coming months. (I hope so)
Some of the recommendations I was given or that were made to me were the following:
The Digital Vision Project from Reuters/Stanford.
Christopher Allen - Life with Alacrity
Corante's Many to Many
Have some ones I should check out?
4 comments:
Nancy White has been talking about online communities for a good 10 years and she is definitely talking and thinking about blogging and community.
I assume you've not yet clicked into Technorati and searched for tags like "online community" "community indicators" and done the same with delicious or you would probably have already found your way to Nancy and others who discuss these topics.
Most blogging conferences touch on this topic as well - Northern Voice, Blogon, SXSW is getting in on the act and of course Blogher.
I think my comments were broken. Thanks for the reference. I hadn't looked through Technorati thanks for the pointer.
You might also check out Lee LeFever's CommonCraft, though is it on hiatus while he travels around the world. The Archives are worth a dig.
And here are some others that I peruse:
Randy Moss
Community Mobilization
http://www.como.typepad.com/
Robin Hamman
cybersoc.com
http://cybersoc.blogs.com/
Christopher Carfi
The Social Customer Manifesto
http://www.socialcustomer.com/
Danyel Fisher
Made out of people
http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf/
(He hasn't posted since August, but his work is really interesting)
I'd add the work of Eugene Eric Kim of Blue Oxen, Rheingold and company's moblogging site, and any of the people blogging about communities of practice!
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