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Robert Scoble: "I think a community that is decentralized is stronger than one that's centralized."I've gotta disagree... experience says otherwise. As we're seeing with the increasing diffusion of the broader blogosphere, decentralized communities are inherently shallow and fragile. The stronger and more clearly defined your hub, the more resilient and real the community becomes.
That doesn't mean you can't build in redundancy, and it doesn't mean you can't distribute the process of content creation out along the spokes. (As with Usenet.) It simply means that a community needs a sense of place, common experience, and leadership. Three things that you lose the further you get from a central, defining locus of activity.
A community is often difficult to really join. It has rules that can be enforced, and occasionally cheated. It means something to its denizens... they're invested in it, via cash, sweat or time. It isn't entirely self-organizing, because it requires some form of leadership to give it direction. It feels like a territory worth defending, if necessary.
It feels like home, in other words.
01-03-2004 06:52:38AM - Permalink - Post Reply - Read Comments [1] category: Staff
related topics: (online) (community) (decentralization)