Not it’s Ianiv taking notes again.
How does a community become a group of bloggers?
What constitutes community?
Against the long tail.

What constitutes community?
In the real world people are part of a community because they live close to their neighbours. Proximity.
How does this work online? There is no “place”.

The pervasive Site-Based Model

  • Online learning: Learning content management system.
  • Social Networking: Orkut, Friendster, Flickr
  • What about Yahoo Groups?

There is proximity, but are they really communities?

Common aspects of communities
web of relationships, common values, common interests…

Communities as Networks of Semantic Relations

  • Network: not just proximity, there is a relation
  • Semantics: This relations are about something.

Against the Long Tail
Some members are connected to many other members. But most members are connected to just a few members, the long tail.
i.e. Boingboing, Instapundit, get a lot of links. Other websites get 1 or 2 links.
Sites with the most links are more likely to be found by more people.

Quote: “Most people who talk about the Long Tail are not part of it.”
But we are.

Preferential Attachment
I we were connected to everyone there would be no long tail.
It happens because there is a shortage of something. Shortage of attention and time, people cannot read all the blogs.
The attachments are practically random. You reach out for what is available, not because it is good. i.e. Instapundit, easy to find.

Network Semantics
Networks defined as a set of semantic connection, not random ones.
A community as a network = semantically based.
What is the meaning of a post (or a person, a resource)? We can try to attach some meaning by tagging. You get a power law curve of tags and the meaning of the post becomes the tags in the big spike of the curve. But the meaning of the post is more complex.
Wittgenstein: Meaning is Use. The meaning is not just contained in the post. The meaning of the post is not inherent in the post. It consists not just of what it talks about but in the relations and connection the post has, its context. The meaning is the use of the post, where it is used, how it is used.

Emergence: Discreet entities are organized and meaning emerges from the entitites. You need a perceiver who recognizes the pattern. (i.e. pixels on tv, form a picture).
Using words to define a concept = The meaning becomes the word.

If the meaning is inherent on the post you get a network that is basically random. If the meaning is distributed, derived from the relations, you get a different network.

Why is this important
If we attach meaning in a random fashion then you get the big spike telling the long tail what is important.
If nobody tells you how to attach meaning (i.e. what tag to use) the no one is in control.

How do we kill the big spike
Online learning: move from a centralized placed-based networks to something that is distributed, decentralized.
Received wisdom: we need a standard framework.

Community:
Means of organizing input and experience.
Mechanism for putting that experience into context.
Means of creation, being part of someone else’s experience.

Organizing Experience
We need to be able to filter. Determining what we want is easier to determine what we don’t want. Create a representation of connections between people and resources.
Attach metadata about posts in the RSS. Add a link to a FOAF file. This gives a mechanism to find resources based on your placement in a community of like-minded individuals.
Third party metadata. Metadata created by the readers of the post. Link references, annotations. But it cannot be site based, it wont create a network. Again, use RSS. i.e. add someones comment to the post’s metadata.

When we get the distributed social network patterns of organization will emerge. You no longer have to search, the network becomes the search.
The community is the network, there is no centralized place. Meaning emerges from the community rather than defining the community.