What a fabulous cross-blog discussion about cross blog discussion, care to join us?

I'm really enjoying this conversation with Steve Shu.  Want to begin at the beginning?  Start here.

After the second thread, Steve wrote an incredible post about blog community facilitation learning.  I asked him some questions about connections between offline/online communities and how to encourage non-bloggers into a blogging community.

His response:

Steve answered my questions both in a comment and back over at his blog.

* Blogs compliment offline relationships because they help archive and trace out a discussion and because they occur ascychronously.

* Blog commuities that tend to work have more of a peer-to-peer relationship versus an expert leader with a flock.   He's written about this topic here.

* To attract non-bloggers to a blog community, a combination of other tools are needed to raise awareness of blogging and other Web 2.0 tools.  Steve shares his presentation to a group of nonprofits in Dallas.

My favorite ("clipped") quote:

"Many chronic (illness) bloggers (joke) are early adopters and know how to integrate and use a bunch of tools. Many people are not so early on the curve though. We also need good blog jargon translation skills. .... to accelerate the dialogue and avoid barriers for those trying to learn."

What do you think? Write a response on your blog and ping us by leaving the URL in the comments or tagging your post with this technorati tag below.  (Steve, is this right way to get a cross-blog thread with a few people?)

Technorati Tags: blog_communities

Comments

[Steve Shu]

Beth,

What a great summary. Thanks!

As to your point about carrying on a cross-blog thread, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure if there are any conventions other than using trackback pings to your blog post here. As for your creative suggestion of tagging, I wonder how well the tagging method will work. I'm a little less advanced there - I use del.icio.us regularly, but I've only used del.icio.us tagging for personally managing bookmarks. I've also conducted some (small) experiments to see how tagging affects the search engines, but I've never used tagging for exchanging and tracking more dynamic info as you suggest. Seen people use it, but have never experienced the logistics firsthand. I may have to look at some of the sidebar links you have on social bookmarking to get some of the finer points.

But back to the discussion on facilitating blog communities, one thing that I have found hard to overcome is that blogging tends to exclude those less advanced at using the internet. Maybe that works ok in the for-profit world, but in the non-profit world, one needs to gather along as many people as one can. Any thoughts here?

[Beth]

Hi Steve,

First about the tangent of using tags to encourage cross-blog conversation.

The tag I used for this post was "blog_communities" and I created a technorati tag. What that does is put my post in page with other blog posts that have used this tag (as well as flickr photos, delicious links, etc). It creates a quasi community or what some folks have called a "tag stream."

You can find other people who are interested in the topic or gain instights about the topic. A distributed conversation where the bloggers are responding to each other in the way we are, could use to see if anyone is "listening" to our conversation and "thinking-aloud" or if we wanted to ramble rouse - go to a particular blogger's post on the topic and leave a comment/trackback to a piece of the distributed conversation.

Another way a tag has generated a cross blog exchange (just one back and forth) is here:
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2005/10/j_leroy_riffs_o.html

I hope I'm making sense -- I'm thinking outloud. I don't know the answer.

And now, back to the topic and the question of how blogging tends to exclude those less advanced at using the internet . . . I think your point about using other communication channels - both online/offline is the answer. And, as far as the online participation, to give people different pathways or tracks into the conversation.

[Amy Gahran]

Hi, Beth

Thanks for mentioning this post (and the cross-blog conversation of which it is part) over on my blog, The Right Conversation.

Some things you and Steve Shu said here triggered a new line of thought for me, which I've started exploring in a new posting: "Blogs as a Barrier to Conversation."

See:
http://snipurl.com/ldjv

Thanks, and I hope to continue this conversation!

- Amy Gahran
RightConversation.com