On Oct 22, 2008, at 5:33 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: > One problem is that compared to an e-mail list like this, most of the > "web-based communities" have too rigid a structure, while this is > much like an informal conversation where one person says something > and then someone else responds, etc., and there may be different > individual conversations going on between subsets of the group at the > same time, etc.
And too rigid a structure can be a community-killer, as I've seen happen more than once over more than 25 years. Online communities that rely on the technology to structure the communication too tightly, as well as the ones that are very strict on enforcing topicality, tend to have low populations, and going from less structure to more structure or radically altering the technology base of the community can trigger population crashes as people are driven off by the hassle factor. The e-list format does very much resemble a conversation, as well as some degree of cross-pollination between conversation threads, and the blog format can sometimes isolate the topical threads *too* much. > Also, as someone has mentioned, many people prefer having the > messages come to them (as on a list like this) rather than them > having to remember to look somewhere else for them . . . Now, this isn't necessarily a problem if you set the RSS feed up right. (I follow several online communities from my mail client, which can import RSS feeds along with mail accounts. Getting xkcd in my morning email is a delightful thing to wake up to. :) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
