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Conversing With Your Community to Find Something
Doc Searls has a great piece on Communities of Unmade Minds where he posits that people converse in little communities online because we are looking for something... an answer... because the "subjects of interest are inconclusive."
I think he makes a very good point, that we are discussing to figure things out, but those interests change, as news and information change, and so communities morph. That's one reason why I find social networks clunky. They are about stating the nature of a relationship at one moment in time, in one way, though humans are messy and morphing constantly. Emotional truth is a moving target.
And you socialize for different reasons, both internal and external. It's a feedback loop, where I find myself responding to the news of the day, talking about it with others in my blog, both so I can understand it better by writing about it, and so that others can know and respond, and in this way we help each other. But I also have interests that originate internally and my blog is an opportunity to reach out to a community to talk about those things that originate with me, that are questions or issues of importance.
Where I think new business models can help is by listening to people, thinking through the complexities of these issues, the user interface and the interaction, to make tools for socializing online, with various media, to meet user's needs in intelligent and sensitive ways. They you don't have to shill, because people will be all over you wanting more.
"It's the UI, stupid."
Posted by Mary Hodder at 02:07 PM on June 08, 2004