Sunday, November 09, 2003

The nature of community and interaction via blogs.

I ran across a post at Jeremy Hiebert's headspaceJ -- Instructional Design and Technology that linked to this post and this one at blog.IT which prompted this post at Object Learning.

The topic of community interests me and I think that Brian at Object Learning makes some of the points I might have made about Evans musings as well as many that I wouldn't have thought about. The whole topic is worth some more thought but these are my initial ones and I duplicated this post to Corner of Babble. (They usually have different readers and the topic might be of interest to both)

Evan is right that a lot of the time it isn't a conversation that we are engaged in so much as a conversation about each other, though most have a comment or two to add when they link to someone else. And if no one comments on our posts or links back to them adding their thoughts, or we don't know that they have or don't feel comfortable initiating contact with someone whose posts we have thoughts about, then the community aspect is difficult to feel or see.

I think that it might have something to do with our particular motivation and approach to the world though. If we are reticent about commenting on others blogs (something I sometimes have a difficulty with myself until I feel some comfort level with who they appear to be by what they write), they might not stumble across ours and share in our conversation.

But even when we know who is linking to us, participate in commenting on others blogs and they ours, it is a loose community of interests and the bonds that might be created are not necessarily as strong as a newsgroup or BB. It takes more effort to create and maintain a connection here.

And that sends me off on a half a dozen different tangents...

I may post more about this after I think about it.

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