I’ve just stumbled upon a fascinating piece by Dan Hon which goes into considerable detail about the way in which the UK weblogging scene evolved a community of sorts – a community that not every UK weblogger is a part of, but a community of and for webloggers anyway. To my knowledge, this is the first time this micro-history has been written down and published on a site and it may be of interest to anyone who cares about the ways in which stuff that happens online solidifies into matter and then collapses into real-life communities. One of the most interesting aspects of the article is that it posits that often the community (or the potentiality for community) radically predates the tool or forum used to facilitate it. Related posts: I talk about what it means to be part of a community | Meg writes about community versus community tools.
From Dan: “Would anyone say that a community existed? Possibly. Maybe not quite just yet. What you would be able to say, though, is that there existed an arbitrary set of people, say, people who write blogs and live in the UK, who were on the tentative cusp of actually starting to talk to each other on a regular basis – they hadn’t yet got organised.”