How the community grows?

However willing the blogger may be to engage with the weblog community, and however amenable the underpinning technologies may be to the task... it is not easy. Most weblog audiences are small. The bulk of the web is read by 4 or 5 people, or is completely private. Weblog readers are usually those already known to the blogger: friends and family. With time people link to them and they will grow. Weblogs build relationships amongst interest groups, geographic groups, and friends and family. They spread virally through these groups, and cults of personality emerge as new weblogs are created.

Readers who express their opinions on their site will be interested in the responses to their comments and will return to read them. Commenters become invested in these conversations and come back to them. Ties in with Gilly Salmon 65% come back to read message board response. Bloggers amplify each other’s voice when they link to them. Having your stuff read by, and replied to, by someone else is an intimacy. What you then see is a messy extension of the blogger's identity by those who respond to them, and those they connect to. It is this connected identity which produces a multi-subjectivity, unique to online communities. Counter-intuitively the best, strongest, and most creative communities can emerge out of the interconnect nature of individual spaces. Empowers the development in an organic way of self-selecting communities of interest. Dissolves the geographical barriers (global interconnectedness).

[tag: community]