Cybering Archives

Weblog Community
 
 
 

July 2, 2000

(theme music).. if you haven't stumbled upon the wonderful world of weblogging and journals online, here's another venue for both exhibitionistic and voyeuristic tendencies. Yes, people write about their lives. You can, too. To get started... go to Blogger or Weblogs, and click on the site titles that interest you. Most weblogs link to their favorite weblogs, and you can surf and sample and bookmark until satiated.
 

May 18, 2000
Brig Eaton of brig.nu offers these thoughts on the weblog community explosion/ implosion.

"as i was waiting for my email to ponderously download on my 21k connection, i thought about how dead all the weblog mailing lists had been lately. part of the reason i've been getting so few emails lately. i started to wonder whether the weblog community had disappeared.

after the 10 minutes of torture were done, i found that mike had posted a similar thought.

it got me thinking about the parallel between the blog community and businesses. specifically the growth of a company from startup to huge conglomerate and the loss of community as this happens. admittedly this isn't always the case anymore, but here's what i've experienced.

when a startup has less than a 100 people, it's a close knit group. like cheers, everyone knows your name. everyone is brought together by a unified goal of making the company successful and everyone communicates with everyone else even if they don't work together.

after the company tops a 100 people, you pass more and more people in the halls and say "who's that? do they work here?". what was once a close knit community fragments into many smaller groups, but there's still a link between these groups through the original members.

i think ~400 people is when a company hits the problem phase, due to the explosive growth that has happened, there is no longer a true company culture or community. each individual group has it's own culture and associates less and less with the others. original team members have moved on, removing the links between groups. companies tend to either collapse at this point or develop a new culture which unifies the employees in some way.

do i really need to explain the parallels between this cycle and the weblog community's cycle? weblogs surived the explosion, and re-unified under two very loosely knit groups based on the tools used, blogger or editthispage. and then an even more loosely knit grouping above that of "people who blog". the original sense of connection of coming together with people who know what you do, understand it, and do it themselves is gone. it's like having a connection with people who have a web page, everybody has one, so there needs to be something else to tie you together. each little community has that connection, but there is no connection between these communities. you can now visit a weblog and eavesdrop on a conversation between community members, most of which you don't know and most don't know you.

having a preference for very small startups, it's not surprising that i preferred the "old" community. in the same way that i find it sad when a company becomes too big, i feel sad over the loss of the small close-knit weblog community.

which is not to say that the new smaller communities aren't good places to be, but...

"Sometimes you wanna go... Where everybody knows your name And they're always glad you came…"
 

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The egroups weblogs reborn and weblogs2 discussion groups have been talking about fragmentation within the community, the E/N people, the commercialization of weblogs at news sites (several newspapers now have professional bloggers), the line between blogging and journalism (ie; is the quest for legitimacy 'selling out'), the 'history' of the community (someone pointed out the online diarists community has both an oral and online history project), and waxing nostalgiac about manageable communities before the storm; BBS, usenet, the well, etc.

If you're part of a chat, mailing list, discussion group, webring etc. community, I'd be very interested in some writings from the viewpoint of a participants' experience of community formation, cohesion, and fragmentation. I was especially interested in the spinoff of a sysops-nostalgia discussion on weblogs reborn... all these people with their homemade, patched-together systems, pre-the hype and money culture of the net.

....Here's a kernel of an idea that I'm working on.. that blogging has changed my life. It's turned me from a passive to active participant, it's forced me to delineate my ideas more clearly, it's shown me how repetitive and limiting my depressed thought and life habits were and challenged me to move on from the same-old-shit. It's given me a different idea about intellectual property (I was formerly more stingy) and about levels of revelation/ exhibitionism. And there's been this odd phenomenon whereby I fantasize 'a public'.. readers whose expectations I'd like to satisfy. And this turns out (like dream images) to be projection, having not much at all to do with either the number or motivations of actual readers.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Weblog Resources

The Dark Ages of Weblogging
Weblog Madness
Linkwatcher
Eatonweb Blog Portal
jjg's page of only weblogs
Cardhouse Linx
Apathy Linx
Twernt's Linx
Metascene Portal