The metacommunity concept as a framework for OPML based communities (part 2)
(part 1 is here)
First, let’s address why we need communities smaller than the blogosphere istelf.
As the number of use cases that can be made for blogs continues to grow with initiatives like structured blogging, microformats, SSE and the recent web clipboard, will this necessitate a change with the way we interact with the blogosphere?
In other words, will it become more common for blog readers to only want a subset of a particluar blog’s feed?
If blog use becomes what startups like Edgeio seem to be implying, then the answer is probably yes.
Consider an example where a particular blog routinely posts about tech, family, cooking recipes and also sells hand made products.
You may only be interested in the tech post and not the recipes.
Tags help, but are both ambiguous and impractical.
Collective intelligence in tagging and bookmarking can help.
We often need a tighter loop with less noise and more signal.
This notion is prompted by Scoble and Winer saying the blogosphere is adopting some of the negative usenet and mail list traits.
By it’s virtue of being so open, it will necessarily grow in noise, much of which could be created by good citizens using the system for structured blogging.
We can’t expect everyone to maintain a blog for every topic they wish to contribute to, so we either need to filter in a very sophisticated manner, or evolve into complex, segmented metacommunities.
It seems to me that reading lists can play a big role in creating metacommunities, acting like a topic-based buddy list.
In this way, we can direct some posts toward actual communities, even if they are still available to the greater system.
And once we have an open standard for explicitly replying to a post, rather than implicitly assuming such from a link, tightly bound, threaded conversations can co-exist with the general posts that are common-place today.
(end part 2)
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