Anyway

The news has been almost uni­formly bad, these last couple of months. What had been com­plaints of too much money chas­ing too few good assets has now turned into the rout of too little money being avail­able to buy any assets, prov­ing yet again that there is no intrins­ic value to any­thing oth­er than what someone will pay for it. Ice­land, Ukraine, and Hun­gary are being bailed out by the IMF, Japan­ese banks are being restruc­tured again, and people are anxiously draw­ing par­al­lels with the great depres­sion and con­vin­cing them­selves that this set of cir­cum­stances is dif­fer­ent enough for safety. 

And in the mean­time, the sun is shin­ing, while the autumn leaves are fall­ing and make sat­is­fy­ing crisp sounds when you walk on them. I showed off my latest pro­ject at a Sun-intern­al con­fer­ence last week, got lots of good feed­back, and am hav­ing a lot of fun work­ing with a great team of people. It almost seems sur­real, this exper­i­ence of real work and life placed against the back­drop of what’s brought on the news as often as you can stand to watch or listen to it.

We cer­tainly do live in inter­est­ing times.

Every now and then I think I should med­it­ate for a few minutes a day. Some­how I sel­dom do, although I find listen­ing to a med­it­a­tion track when fly­ing is a good way to tune out the stand­ard air­plane unpleas­ant­ness. Hav­ing read When Dis­trac­tion is Good, it seems to me as if med­it­a­tion and “recept­ive dis­trac­tion” are prob­ably related. Maybe you can think of going for a quiet walk, or sit­ting in the garden breath­ing in the fresh air, as some sort of med­it­a­tion. As long as you don’t then start think­ing about the weed­ing, of course.

Maybe I’ll find that easi­er to fit into my day.

Someone asked me the oth­er day wheth­er blogs were com­munit­ies. This got me to think­ing about how we define com­munit­ies in the online space. And friends, and fol­low­ers, and how some social net­work­ing sites encour­age enlar­ging the social circle while oth­ers con­cen­trate on people you already know through oth­er means. “Social circle” being extremely loosely defined, of course, just as the term “friend” is much more loosely defined in the online space than in the phys­ic­al, face-to-face world. 

So let’s play with some ideas for a defin­i­tion of com­munity. If you have oth­er ideas, please add them to the com­ments and if you think I’m wrong, tell me why; maybe we can come up with a com­munity defin­i­tion of com­munity. Which leads of course to the real­isa­tion that I do think blogs (some blogs, any­way) con­sti­tute a community.

A com­munity is a group of people who inter­act with each oth­er in some for­um. How’s that for a begin­ning? Not too bad, but it does­n’t really nail down very much; the line-up in your loc­al cof­fee shop could be seen as a com­munity under this defin­i­tion. We need to add a tem­por­al aspect: mem­bers of the com­munity inter­act with each oth­er over a peri­od of time (this rules out the cof­fee shop line-up). And at least some mem­bers of the com­munity have to be act­ive with­in the com­munity (a social for­um where nobody posts any­thing is not a com­munity by this defin­i­tion). This last is more fuzzy (what does “act­ive” mean?) but I think is necessary. 

The defin­i­tion of com­munity needs an “act­ive” aspect since in my opin­ion for a blog to be con­sidered a com­munity, people read­ing it have to com­ment on it. Oth­er­wise it isn’t a com­munity, it’s a pub­lish­ing meth­od. We could get into dis­cus­sions about wheth­er a spoke-and-hub inter­ac­tion mod­el where read­ers com­ment on the posts but not on each oth­ers’ com­ments is still inter­ac­tion, or wheth­er you neeed a many-to-many inter­ac­tion mod­el (which is closer to what most people think of in the phys­ic­al world as a com­munity), but I think that’s a detail. What’s import­ant is that the com­mu­nic­a­tion in the com­munity flows in more than one dir­ec­tion. Mind you, the word “inter­act” is a verb, which implies an action, so adding the adverb “act­ively” to it is a tau­to­logy, which I try to avoid. 

This leaves: A com­munity is a group of people who inter­act with each oth­er over a peri­od of time in some for­um. Not per­fect, but not bad for a start.