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12 Sep 2005
Dynamic Communities
The piece on Glocalization by Zephoria is well worth a read. When I started reading it, I got a déjà -vu feeling. It is talking about communities. And when talking about communities I always click into Usenet. So why is Web 2.0 related to Glocalization? Is there something new and different from the past?
Yes, I think there is. And when reading this piece I though of two things: boundaries and re-alignment. In the past the boundaries were very strict: you either subscribed to a Usenet group or not, or you belonged to a web-community or not. By switching communities you basically were switching your persona. With Web 2.0 the boundaries seem to become fuzzy. You still belong to one or more community, but there now also grey areas. You can be a member of community, but live on the edge. The thing you write can now belong to more communities and thus the repurposed data defines to what communities you really belong. The thing you write defines your community and not the things (websites, feeds, etc) you subscribe to. This will also create more complex social networks.
All this personal data allows to re-align communities. We are no longer dependent on sites (or usenet) that create communities for us. We can create communities ourselves. Just by publishing on your weblog and by repurposing data from others, new communities are created ad-hoc. Blogrolls are one part of this, but a blog-roll is to passive (lurkers are still everywhere). But the real community is created by expressing yourself, relate with others and creating a ping-back cloud. By analysing those ping-back clouds we will be able to find and define the new ad-hoc communities. These communities are not static, but something very dynamic, both in time and content. We are going to dynamic communities in Web 2.0/