Before I started blogging, but was already heavily in to creating applications for blog, board, etc text analytics, I really questioned the notion of blogosphere community. Risking taboo, I spoke up at our last Weblogging Ecosystems Workshop and asked: I just don't feel like I'm in a community - where is it? Interestingly, a number of other non-bloggers working in the same space expressed a similar opinion.
Well that was many web-ages ago (last May).
Now I'm aware of communities all over the place. In fact, there are far too many opportunities to run with this community or that community. In trying to rationalise some of this I've guessed at two fundamental community types online:
- Extensional communities - these are communities that have a specific location online (a site of some sort), for which there is specific membership, and which works in a certain way. A message board is a good example, but things like Riffs, Amazon, etc. are also key examples.
- Intensional communities - these are communities which have no clear definition with no explicit membership. A network of links between blogs, or an agreement to use a certain tag are types of evidence for these communities.
These two different types of communities have different values, can be analysed in different ways, and ultimately support different types of applications. In addition, participation in them requires and encourages different types of user behaviour.
Interestingly, off-line communities have features of both - they are less structured than extensional communities (generally), but they have a discourse model closer to extensional communities than intentional ones.
(Note that the terms explicit and implicit could well be used to replace extensional and intensional.)
Where is this comming from? I've been looking at a number of link recommendation systems recently - all of them interesting in their own special way. However - there are too many of these already. How does one stay on top? How does one evaluate a recommendation system? One used to rely on uber-bloggers to sift through stuff, but now those guys are becoming heavily overlapping in content, late to discover the interesting stuff and the new-new-mainstream media.
In extensional communities, you know where you are, you know who the experts are, you know who holds the conche. With intentional communities, unless you spend all your time working through your aggregators list of new posts, it is a lot harder to get to the good bits.
The solution, I believe, is in analytical software - putting text mining capabilities in the hands of users. We need far more powerful tools to sift through the content, discover the important information (which is not the same as important pages), visualize various dimensions of information, discover content based communities and so on. This can't be done with just another ranking mechanism.
The technological capabilities are out there - what they are lacking is a way to make users change. Technology always navigates a path between empowered users (that control the technology) and powerful technology (that appears to respond to the user at a more sophisticated level, but which ultimately restricts the space the user can explore).
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