Full Circle Associates

Dethe Elza and I facilitated a session here at MooseCamp at Northern Voice on Community and Blogging. We opened up the floor to stories for a fast flying half hour. Tons of stories. Below are my rough notes. Please excuse typos. I'll post my morning sesions at the NetSquared North event when I can.

What does community mean to you…
How does blogging support it…

Robert: Community is linking. Any time I link to them I feel I ‘am joining them into the community I help feed. That pays off in spades. Any town a geek dinner. I write I’m going to London, who wants to get together. Community that crosses lots of sub communities. Most is geek. Look at who reads or writes me. Technology. Sometimes political. Self defined community via links

What’s fun is making connections with people. I’m shy, lousy with small talk. If I meet people who’s blogs I’ve read I know something, have had some prior online conversation. So I can walk up and continue a conversation starting on blogs. Almost hate to talk about conversations between people as networking. Not business card networking. What I found at blogger events, it’s a filter for people interested in having conversations about rather more stuff. If it is someone I’ve been reading, know their interests, what they like. Blog, writing yourself into existence (Weinberger). Things you are interested in talking about, selves or other. I know having read Roberts blog. I’ll talk about tech. Jeanne Sessum about family, art or other things. Depends on their conversational topics.

Always on salon.

Debbie – writing an undergrad thesis on blogging communities. One interesting thing I found about blogging as a format for the net is that a lot of people tend, despite the net is able to cross boundaries of space and time, interesting tendency for people who blog they tend to build networks in their own geographic region. Urban. Builds into it’s own mini city online. People who have commonalities in profession or interests hobbies get together – F2F and online.

Metaphor – Annie Hall , scene on first date, things going well, Allen says to Keaton, do you mind if I kiss you because later on it will be awkward and we can’t digest our meal. I think of that in terms of we have these personal barriers, tends to devolve into small talk. Blogging manages to expose part of yourself so you can get to the meal with out small talk.

Alex – people tend to keep their circle small in some respects. Natural. The core cannot be too big as people can’t manage it. I find I can extend that core group through RSS. Where I start to see – that’s linking – your community is much larger. Your experiences are much richer. So you might have a small community, but the extended community is bigger..

Allen – I have the opposite geographic – I have less local connections and more distributed. Meaningful colleagues that match my interest, challenge me that I don’t get locally. I love it.

Local I build closer ties with as I see them, but I can go to London and I’m with people I read, I’ve heard of.

Anita Rowland – thinking about the lack of physical community in some, plenty in others. IT takes someone to instigate. Because I enjoy the Seattle meetups I keep them going, bug people into coming, invite. Has worked out, people enjoy it. Not a user group, just people talking. A real community in terms of friendships, personal and biz connections, feuds.

Dennis – I have an anti pattern for the formation of community. I watch 200 RSS feeds and I don’t know who they are. The RSS feed, bloggers who only talk shop, the connection is the topic, not the person. Know name of person and not the blog. And probably don’t know me. So I go to geek dinners, I found that first the invitation thing is a big deal. I know bloggers because of Anita and Robert. Robert had a BBQ and I met Winer. I met Anita at a geek dinner. So the connections work great. Then I’ve gone back to my high school, take pictures, who is this person, what is their blog. Matters to know something about them as people. Really different when you get the F2F connection. It was missing.

Reg – The bridging from an online to a live community. I was in silicon valley, went to an event and met my first real reader. You read my blog! I was at the event. Of 40 there 5-6 read my blogs. A guy from Edmonton and they are reading. That bridge. You become a thought leader. First thing I meet the guys from Dabbble and I’ve written about them and they recognize me. Bridging between online and live is exciting for me. I don’t get conversation on my blog. Posting about companies. So I know I have RSS subs, but don’t know the people reading it. Then go and meet them. That’s the neat value for me. Becoming a thought leader. Recognize.

People who don’t blog can’t relate to that at all. Been to events with girlfriend and she doesn’t blog. She doesn’t have the same experience.

We need support groups for our partners.

To me what makes a community different from interlinking blogs is people making an active effort to get to know each other. Seek to understand the person on the other side. Why in person thing is so important. To see and understand.

John – One of the things I do is tools. There are lots of tools to make networking and socializing, FOAF and other implementations of tools to help make this community and network better. You run into people at events, sit next to someone who is closer to you than you might know, linked into your crowd, and not know it. Not the direct line. There are tools/synergy in that area to get these dispersed groups together.

Kevin – I was picking up on Annie Hall thing. Read a blog comment. Said he was at a conf, guy in front going on and on about XML in a no nothing way. “Allen says I have Marshall McLuan right here.” We do. The experts are right there. Tim Bray can weigh in. Access to those people. Because it is non geographic.

The other thing I wanted to say was a slightly more subtle point. When you are looking for information, you go to Google and search. If you find a blog, then you read some of it, you think this person is interesting, you have a thread of their thought you can connect to plus access to their future thoughts (RSS, reg reading round). Then you will get that too even though you didn’t search. Using people rather than search.

Is it a connection to what that person writes or to that person. I’ll read a book by an author and I become engrossed, but not nec. interested in that person, but the topic. Bit of both.

Authors like Neil Gaiman use the blog to avoid answering fan mail. He is using it as a conversation amplifier. It will vary. I don’t blog about my family, while other people write that way.

Lloyd with Flock. Find it interesting to talk about the accessibility. How to make it more accessible. Find it intensive, but I like to read. A lot of people can’t get the richness without being part of a community. For flock not something we’re going to be doing. Looking to see services or tools to expose more of what people.

Might

Nancy talked about Share

Alan – there is something magical about people you will never meet. People from Netherlands comment on my blog and I can’t read it. Then there is someone who comments on my flickr feed when I post about my dog and we have quick, ephemeral conversation. Micro-ephemeral

Robert S – Antithesis of what we are talking about. On the corporate side –the reason Biz are turned off of blogging and RSS is because of the community, the personal ness of it. Talking about cats. We are here to talk about it. The point is that is what changed in the last year. Started to be seen as a tool that can be used. Podcasting and vodcasting. Before community was turn off, now what is great.

Kevin - If they come to it with the mindset of pure ROI it will fail. They need to become part of the community. Companies say “we need a blog” not we need a community.

Dennis – wanted to point back to surprise value. When we learn something about somebody we didn’t know already. No definite audience and people reveal themselves in fascinating ways. You can find the surprising connection that humanize your association with them. There was a google blog, pictures of dog, very cool. Then they got corporate. I will give you credit of being human if I know something personal about you even if we disagree.

It’s kind of interesting how we talk about friends and community in online world, people we’ve never met, intense relationships. She calls them e-quaiintances. You feel like you know but never met. Divorced experience of going to meet them or coming to meet you, launch into a conversation that has been half going on in your mind.

Categories: northernvoice, moosecamp