"Distributed community"... now there's a phrase that needs explaining.
If you find ETP an interesting community effort, you should read that whole article; it has a lot that is relevent. ETP is a distributed community, and that may be something fairly new.
Sound familiar? This describes the ETP community to a T. We each have our own space. We are not anonymous. Quality runs high among those who actually try.
Resurrecting a Dying Art: "In fact, the chaos of the bulletin board and the chat room can have a profoundly negative effect upon the overall quality of conversation, a new study concludes. But when the talk moves into a less freewheeling environment, the level of the debate seems to improve. . . Unlike the dissonant interaction of public bulletin boards and chats, Reality Check tried to create online spaces where the participants have a sense of ownership and belonging."
Here's an example of what I mean: Everybody Who's Talking About This Article (As you'll see, there's at least one unrelated link from somebody simply mirroring Wired's feed... we need something better I think.)
Here's a thought... I'll work on this when I get time if nobody else beats me to it. How about a Javascriptlet that takes a link and automatically runs a search for other pages mentioning that link using the Weblogs.com search feature? It's not a perfect solution, but it might be a start. Esp. since you could easily include this in your own page.
From On Deciding... Better: "ETP on the other hand is a community where each individual has full autonomy and each person's node is fully owned by that person. Our nodes then have shifting interactions in which you have to listen to a variety of sites to participate in the conversation." How should we find these sites, I wonder? We should answer that question if this community is to develop... as things now, we naturally form cliques, where Q checks T's site daily, and misses P's insightful comment completely, having never checked P's site.
From the study: "In fact, the chaos of the bulletin board and the chat room can have a profoundly negative effect upon the overall quality of conversation, a new study concludes. But when the talk moves into a less freewheeling environment, the level of the debate seems to improve." ETP shares characteristics of both, and I don't know of any other similar situations, except for other weblogs communities (inasmuch as you can even draw a line).
The study I brought up because it challenges some of the assumptions of the necessities for good community. It helps to be identified (as we are), it's good to stay small. In a sense, ETP retains that advantage by spontaneously connecting communities as necessary, just as today, Carpe Diem and On Deciding... Better, yet today we form a larger community via those connections. That is what I found interesting. Benefits of small communities, as the study outlines, yet together, we form a large one.
"As a community of webloggers, are we participating in a great dialogue or are we each just engaging in self-gratification with our monologues?" Yes. Both. It is the mixture that is interesting. I choose to respond to David. I could have ignored him, and it would seem I never saw it; at least, you'd never be able to prove otherwise. Small communities can form around specific weblogs (even 'communities' of one), keeping some of the small feel, yet interacting within a larger community, gaining some of the benefits of the larger community.