The Online Community

Ramblus 14

Published on August 5, 2005 By OckhamsRazor In Blogging

In this post, I polled the community to see how many people were actually in the JoeUser community.

I did this in reference to an article which was offering direction to said community at large in an effort to bring JU back to what that writer apparently felt was "the good ole days." It was a noble effort, but as you can see if you look at the responses I got, the community is only about 18 people, so hardly necessary.

That isn't really so, of course. Of the people that answered, my blog is older than most, but contains probably less than 1% of the total articles written - and these spread out over the larger part of the time means what? Correcto - low traffic to my site (why go back day after day when Ock writes so seldom?) But wait. It wasn't an article, it was a forum post. And I've seen many of the regulars posting all over the place elsewhere, but they didn't check in on my poll. That means one of several things. A) They don't want to give points to me for the sake of the poll (which is silly, I'm no threat to anyone's standing),

They don't view ME as part of the cliq...er...community. C) They are only members of the community so long as they get something out of it, which they clearly would not in this poll, or D) they didn't see it even though I bumped it three times at varying times of day.

Whatever the real answer is, I think I've made my point. I've probably over made it. For a community to be a community, it has to exist. It has to be present. This isn't actually a quality of communities, but of all physically substantial entities. For a ball to be a ball it must be existing in physical presence. Clearly, to me, there is only one person in all of JU that consistently meets that criteria without fail, and that's the simplest solution. Me.

There may be some writers here....some of our top ten users who somehow didn't see the poll maybe, that have readers that live entirely in front of their computers with the writers blog site constantly in a window of their browsers. These writers then have a community of greater than one person. Quite an accomplishment, I suppose, of questionable value.

So what did that original fellow who wanted JU to go back to the good ole days (whatever those may be described as) *really* want? (I'm not quoting the article on purpose for fear of appearing to publically bag on someone's logic. It is irrelevant who said it.) He wanted large groups of people who had never read his blog more than likely (statistically speaking) to behave the way he wanted them to. To be more...communal, and in specific ways (which he iterated.)

It seems so difficult for many of the people I see writing here to just let things be how they are. And it's my belief that one cannot have it any other way. Things WILL be how they are, no matter how hard you might want to try to change them.

There is only one thing I can change. Me. Which again is the simplest solution. I believe that changing me is the only way to change the community. What would happen if everyone agreed?

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