damn it’s cold in here. and I know it’s crazy hot outside. sounds like it could be record-breaking over the weekend, up into the 90s. it always is when I go to Webvisions.
dude, Nick Finck is following me! huh, Derek designed the blogger logo.
he’s a darn lively speaker.
virtual community. his book in 2000, in the last part of the last chapter, 4 pages about blogging. now you can’t talk about virtual community w/out talking about blogging.
“feels like something slightly new going on”
grrr…he’s reading his slides.
definition of community “you know it when you see/feel it” ability to use voice in public/immediate way forming relationships over time. (that works for me.)
george pullman: the company town. what happens when one guy controls the whole community. cut everybody’s salary, but left up prices/rents. “they burnt that sh!t down”
bulletin boards, usenet (blah blah blah), the well: as the company town.
blogs: you are your own company town. shows of hands to prove idea of decentralized conversations, commenting on other people’s ideas. (pace Ralph’s commentary on that topic.)
connective tissue, sidewalks of the intarwebs. “trackbacks, which are more or less dead” and all the usual stuff, technorati, blogrolls, and so on and so forth. “nobody’s talking about that one.”
boingboing used to have comments, but everybody picked on everybody else. “nobody graffiti’s their own house”
aggregators, by interest or location. pb on the spot!
as the age of company town diminishes, how will we find each other?
memes as proof of life. (four things. hey, did any/all of the people I tagged actually do it?)
what’s different? is this good for us? he thinks so. no boss-man can turn you out. human-scale …the vastness is part of why I dropped off of mefi.
“no one to cry to when someone is mean to you” (am reminded of joeclark: he just cries out to the whole world. ;))
flickr is a company town; manager: “she’s my wife, she’s very nice.” but they understand that they live in a different world; more ways to get pics out than in. (tho they aren’t EASY now.)
when amazon started, you could post your review, lots of reviews, but no way to show “joe’s awesome reviews” until the common POV changed.
livejournal, also a company town, but allows public/private boundaries.
when you think about real-life communication, we don’t talk to the whole world at once. we wear different hats. he thinks this thing we’re doing — same to everybody — will be seen as a historic anomaly. (vs. joeclark & the death of privacy)
if you run a company town “turns out we’re really the man!” (OlyBlog?) — treat them well: you need them more than they need you. “anybody who says ‘we’re creating community’ is lying to you.” example of JPG Magazine: instead of starting their own tool, they created a flickr group. go to where they are. look for the communities that pre-exist: there’s already a community for almost everything.
life cycle ideas of online community….
“nowhere to go but up” yay! optimism!
comment from audience: threadless, on profile pages, has places to pull in flickr photos, delicious links, last.fm, own blog, etc. acknowledgement of diversity of selves?
“maybe that’s where the e from flickr went” superglue
“less of a social benefit to being a dickhead” in a decentralized system.
“the gentleman mentions fray” — a company town: he picked/edited/created questions, etc. wanted people to tell stories, but now that’s happening all the time, all over. if it comes back, it’ll have to be different.
what piece of the puzzle is still missing? if he could invent a fantasy tool, talk directly to our communities w/out being a company town. making it/blogosphere smarter about human relationships w/out anybody being in charge.
what about 9rules, etc.? (I’m checking my email, etc., instead of paying attention.)
how does bringing money in change the community? (mefi has a “cover charge” now) in the decentralized model, money doesn’t come into it, except to create the site. “ask matt” of course, people in the audience already know the answers. example of craigslist charging people who “should pay”.