[via Rodney‘s tip off about Compete.com]
A comment on Rodney’s blog – from Michael – made me think:
“those of us interested in growing on-line communities the message seems to be that setting up special interest groups is going to be less effective than developing a useful application”
If there are 3 types of communities – one of them the type that grows from shared activities, one from shared space and one from shared interest – then maybe Facebook is doing 1 and 2 and blogs are doing 3? Oversimple probably.
A blog can provide a forum for shared interests but to do so requires an active and developing comment stream. In part this doesn’t happen because the current comment systems for blogs are clumsy in part because 90% of readers are happy to be passive observers