The popular sites you observe fall right into line with my thinking back in the BBS days. Common interest. Wine, Ale or whatever your *specific* interest is. A well designed site that is specific to a group interest and is easy to navigate will attract use. I think many of the weblog tools provide the necessary tools to create the environment. The challenge is to take those tools and use them correctly and to restrict the 'flavour' of the site to something specific.

Heading outside to follow a heaving snarling snowblower around but I will be thinking about this.

Here I am in TO, Joan Rivers in the background. Missing you all - but seriously folks you are onto to something here. It is surely purpose + conversation.

What to do with all this wit? The full bells and whistles version would have many aspects of a projects intranet but also the informality of a BBS. The conversation also has to moderated but not led. That is the limit which blogs have hit - too much the univoice (...I expect you to agree, by the way). BBSs multiple thread authors was key, I think.

I have no clue what BSS is. I blog because it's a) better than talking to myself outloud and b) more convenient than emailing wierd lideas, links and games to friends.

As much as I love a good disagreement and I can jump into I generally stay away from blogs and sites that primarily voice opinions I strongly disagree with. The reasons are simple- they often aggravate me to no end and I feel it's rude to go into someone else's house and piss all over their rug, so to speak. If I fell I know them or have some sort of connection with them I might stir up some debate. I feel comfortable doing so here, though it rarely happens, because I feel I have an online rapport with Alan. Building that sort of rapport takes plenty of reading and commenting on my part before I feel the website author will bother to listen to or respect what I have to say. Frankly I don't have the patience to go through that with someone who primarily writes things I disagree with. Hopefully something in this comment overlaps with something in the above post in someone's mind other than mine.

No problem. You are quite on point, Ben. That is a very good summation of a blog - it is someone's place. A BBS (bulletin board service) was not any one person's place but the group's and the dynamic was very different - a real community discussion. And more of a discussion rather than a debate as the rules against flaming and respecting newbies (when did you last use that word) as well as the job of moderating kept it above a certain line. At blogs where political debate occurs, there is often a far nastier tone and much less development of ideas. It is more like visiting the home of a jerk or the home of someone who has let the jerks take over.

The research bears you out Alan - moderation seems to be an essential for a community that works

And just to be clear, I am not necessarily advocating a return to BBS but something that allows a BBS of blogs somehow. Maybe.

Chugging around the web for ideas related to this I came across a couple of quite interesting takes on <i>The Cluetrain Manifesto</i> which reviews I link to not so much to agree with as to point out once again that there are few things worth believing that are also not worth ridiculing:<ul><li>A book review of <i>The Cluetrain Manifesto</i> by John C. Dvorak which quite interestingly implies that the echo chamber of blogs is a means by which dot-com has-beens can maintain control of the agenda. This is a brilliant allegation (whether or not it is true or not) as it conveys all that is wrong with blogs and the A-list.</li><p><li><i>The Gluetrain Manifesto</i> is straight parody and it reminds me of Lawrence Stern's mid-1700s parody of the concept of the novel, <i>Tristram Shandy</i> - called here craptastically but somewhat accurately "a comic meta-novel".</li></ul>If we are to understand where blogging has gone wrong and actually disassociates rather than creates community, we have to ditch our interests in any particular media...might as well do that through humour.

Maybe this is what is needed? The Ecotone Wiki is about place and is collectively written. It is not apparently written like Wikipedia where anyone can edit each entry. It is so simple it beats the hell out of social software. It is getting somewhat back to where I was last year but on a smaller scale.

So, and by comparison, how can any meaningful reception of information occur when you have this for your Bloglines subscriptions? Seb states that there are 1296 on the list but that 85% of people using subscription based readers subscribe to fewer than 150 feeds. I read his chart to state about 50% of people subscribing have 50 feeds or less.<p>Question: how is this expanding anything if most draw only 50 voices? Sure this is a great compliment to mainstream media - but, if you look at many of the 1296 feeds...they are mainstream media. So is RSS only about organizing the sites you would read anyway because they are your favorite media source and the blogs you would read anyway because they are people you already know?

Dean Esmay has an interesting and very uncynical thread on the successes of the internet and blogs.