Comments on: Are your readers a community?

By: New at IdeaLab: The People Formerly Known as the Audience need a new name – Invisible Inkling

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:48:14 +0000

[...] at IdeaLab, I’m continuing a conversation I started on Twitter a couple weeks ago that spilled over here as [...]

By: Ryan Sholin

Ryan Sholin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 01:05:57 +0000

OK, I think I've got something new to say about this, thanks to one of the "parenting" (ha!) blogs I subscribe to. Namely, Geekdad. Here's the relevant link. And here's my interpretation: Maybe this is the key difference between an "audience" (or "readers") and a "community": In an audience, the members share a topic of interest; in a community, the members are the topic of interest.

By: Greg Linch

Greg Linch — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 01:59:51 +0000

I’ve been pondering this. I think the point about readers not implying community is a good one — I completely agree.

But I don’t think community means that people are necessarily talking with each other. For example, you can have a sense of community through a shared experience like reading a newspaper, but this a lower threshold for “community.”

One of the great advantage of the Web is the lower barrier to not only enhanced shared experiences, but interactive ones — be they face to face on Seesmic or comments on a blog.

Also, there’s no one way to form a community. A community could form on it’s own or as a result of a community building efforts.

Getting back to the original question, it’s hard to pin down an answer. So the question really is, “How do you define community?”

Is it just someone who visits a site once — or even regularly — or is engaged through commenting, submitting photos, etc.? Something in between?

By: Chris Amico

Chris Amico — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:38:51 +0000

Community implies people are talking to each other, without relying on a single node (me or my news org) to mediate, along with a shared sense of identity based on who's in, and possibly who's out. That's a harder thing to achieve than I suspect most people realize. It's certainly not something I've managed to build on any of my sites, except possibly at fleeting moments on DalianDalian.

By: Howard Weaver

Howard Weaver — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:41:07 +0000

Community implies a kind of unanimity that I don’t think you can assume from readers of news. Daily Kos has a community. If we define that word broadly enough to encompass a group who shares only its interest in news (eg readers of a mainstream news site) it has become vague to the point of uselessness.