Community? Further defined.

In the last segment the key to communities was defined (it's about identity), and today we look at the taxonomy at the next level. The hardest part for people to figure out is “why would someone want to do it that way?” We identify only with our own experience, it is hard to understand the preferences of other people. The only thing to do is to ignore all sense of “good” and “bad” and move on to identifying the subtleties, whatever they are. No one's asking you to live in their world, just understand it. The two factors that differentiate communities are style of participation and type of audience (or "location of the ego").

Each person identifies with a style of participation and tends to prefer it over others. The phone, the barstool, the soapbox, IM, and e-mail all have their own styles. People wind up where they feel comfortable -- where they identify.

There is little difference between writing an e-mail, a listserv post, or a newsgroup message. All give you time to think before you write (whether you use it or not) and opportunity to edit. Among the three, the messages themselves and the dialogues that result are more similar than different. I'd argue that they all reduce to each other. But differences do exist, as some people are passionate about which they prefer. Let's break it down.

E-mail is trivial to send and personal, listservs are less private and require a subscription (a committment in itself), and newsgroups are full-on public. These differences do not result in large changes between the messages. The opportunity to think first -- the act of composition -- dictates the style of message. The real differences among e-mail, listservs and newsgroups lie in their levels of committment: a personal relationship vs. a subscription vs. a sea of names and addresses. Each appeals to a different style of participation.

The type of audience is not a large factor among these three, but it is elsewhere. Blog entries read different than an e-mail or a post on a threaded discussion site. The difference? A blog is a soapbox for the ego. It projects to an audience (real or imagined). Some allow comments, but all threads are spun from the same mind. Like e-mail, the author has time to sit down and think first, but what follows is a broadcast, not a dialogue. Any comments that come back are more like “Letters to the Editor” than a conversation.

Wiki webs on the other hand, also contain article-like information, but they are democratic communities. Heck, they're downright communal compared to blogs. Anyone can post? Anything? You can even erase stuff? Mutual respect abounds. Ego is decentralized. Wiki webs contain information minus the conversations. Like a tribe building a drum, wasps building a nest, or the Amish at a barn-raising. Yea verily, community aboundeth in yonder Wiki Web.

The fact that Wiki webs have a fraction of the popularity of blogs speaks volumes about the power of ego in society. But that's fodder for another blog.

To recap: Community is identity. Similar communities are distinguished by style of participation and type of audience (a.k.a. the location of the community's ego). None of these trade-offs are good or bad, each satisfies a different group of people. Each style suits its own persona.