Building Communities
Oct. 22nd, 2006 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pphaneufapenwarr, not so long ago, was thinking about interesting communities, and how they constitute themselves. This is a subject I find highly interesting, because I've always found that belonging to certain communities made me better, through various means. I am exposed to ideas, I get to gain from other peoples mistakes (sometimes called "experiences", to be nice) without having to make them myself, building a network of people with particular skills (and conversely, building a reputation with regard to the skills I have), and so on. At the bare minimum, it's great fun, if nothing else.
The question we had was about how do these communities arise, and what can one do to find the proper people and form a community? Advogato, for example, was a very interesting experiment, loosely tying a bunch of unrelated blogs on the single recent entries page, which then gave way to the Planets concept (for the LiveJournal users, this is like a community friends page).
But I don't know, I find the Planets leave me wanting. I liked the cross-cut of various interests on Advogato, so I don't really end up reading any of the Planets in particular, I just use my feed reader to keep track of my own particular, customized "community". But the problem with this is keeping it from being static. People came to Advogato, and either stuck, or left eventually. Things worked themselves out, over time.
I'm not entirely sure how to fix this. I'm kind of hoping there's some magic network effect that can be leveraged or something...
The question we had was about how do these communities arise, and what can one do to find the proper people and form a community? Advogato, for example, was a very interesting experiment, loosely tying a bunch of unrelated blogs on the single recent entries page, which then gave way to the Planets concept (for the LiveJournal users, this is like a community friends page).
But I don't know, I find the Planets leave me wanting. I liked the cross-cut of various interests on Advogato, so I don't really end up reading any of the Planets in particular, I just use my feed reader to keep track of my own particular, customized "community". But the problem with this is keeping it from being static. People came to Advogato, and either stuck, or left eventually. Things worked themselves out, over time.
I'm not entirely sure how to fix this. I'm kind of hoping there's some magic network effect that can be leveraged or something...
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-23 06:59 am (UTC)OMG, did I write that?
Anyway, it's not a bad idea. Dynamic Planets that pick up stuff. After all, I explicitly filter for Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu, why not have them figure out that I write Debian articles and just pick them up automagically?
no subject
Date: 2006-10-23 07:22 am (UTC)I'm not totally sure a dynamic Planet would do, because it'd be tailored for what exactly? What I have in mind would be a dynamic Planet Pphaneuf, which would pick up stuff automatically, or at least, suggest new feeds to add to my reader.
Maybe that's what Technorati is supposed to be good for?
no subject
Date: 2006-10-23 07:32 am (UTC)I know the My LJ page happens to present you with journals of friends of friends. But it ranks those by popularity. Perhaps they should also try overlapping your tag clouds, or the tag clouds of the friends that you read?
Some way of automatically detecting your interests and which feeds you already read would be enough information to suggest new journals.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-23 08:00 am (UTC)I'm sure there's something to do, I'm just not sure what.