while it’s been blogged a bit, i’ve been moving so cut me some slack. clay has a new essay on
Communities, Audiences, and Scale
which makes several points nicely:
“Prior to the internet, the differences in communication between community and audience was largely enforced by media — telephones were good for one-to-one conversations but bad for reaching large numbers quickly, while TV had the inverse set of characteristics. The internet bridged that divide, by providing a single medium that could be used to address either communities or audiences. Email can be used for conversations or broadcast, usenet newsgroups can support either group conversation or the broadcast of common documents, and so on. Most recently the rise of software for “The Writable Web”, principally weblogs, is adding two-way features to the Web’s largely one-way publishing model.
With such software, the obvious question is “Can we get the best of both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?””
clay also has a new low volume list for spreading his gospel on
Networks, Economics & Culture
.