In the early days of online communications, there was much debate about whether the Internet could foster a sense of community; whether online “virtual” communities would start to replace physical human interaction and also whether Internet usage in general was detrimental for offline community engagement. Much of this ignored the fact that in societies that were early Internet adopters, the nature of community bonds and structures had anyway already changed. As Wellman, Boase and Chen suggest in their paper “The Networked Nature Of Community: Online And Offline ”:

Communities started changing from groups to networks well before the advent of the Internet. Initially, people believed that industrialization and bureaucratization would dissolve community groups and leave only isolated, alienated individuals. Then scholars discovered that communities continued, but more as sparsely-knit, spatially-dispersed social networks rather than as densely-knit, village-like local groups. A similar debate has developed about the impact of the Internet on community. Some fear that it will isolate people from face-to-face interactions. Others extol the Internet's ability to support far-flung communities of shared interest.

In their study, Wellman, Boase and Chen conclude that the increasingly connected nature of our online world is moving us away from certain types of interaction being located in a particular place and towards greater multi-modality in our online person-to-person connections:

The developing personalization, wireless portability, and ubiquitous

connectivity of the Internet all facilitate networked individualism as the basis of community. Because connections are to people and not to places, the technology affords shifting of work and community ties from linking people-in-places to linking people at any place.

Probably the best-known example of this is the explosive weblogging phenomenon, which has seen thousands of simple, personal publishing web sites emerge in the past three years. These sites (weblogs) have created a throng of individual editorial voices with a high degree of interconnection, which means ideas, links and discoveries spread rapidly among them. These independent online voices have restored a much needed personal element to online publishing that had been lost since the Web’s earliest days.

The first web log, according to blogger lore, was the list of links to new and interesting sites begun at the dawn of internet time by Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with the invention of the World-Wide Web at CERN, followed by Netscape’s “What’s New!” page for users of its new web browser in 1993. In 1997, Dave Winer started publishing Scripting News , which was closer to the modern idea of a blog, and Slashdot was launched; but it was not until 1998 and early 1999 that a community of bloggers started to emerge and then grow exponentially. As an indication of the extent of this phenomenon, Blogger and Live Journal (two of the simpler blog creation tools) currently claim around a million users (with at least 200,000 live blogs) each.

In many ways, the weblogging community is close to the original hopes and dreams of online community pioneers. Bloggers have developed a shared history , language , social structures , celebrities , cynics and other features of a community, although weblogging remains a preserve of techno-literate, highly mobile individuals, which means it is still characterised by relative exclusivity compared with the wider population of Internet users. Various recent developments suggest that this is just the beginning and “blogging” is set to hit the mass market, such as Google ’s acquisition of Pyra Labs , who run Blogger, increasing mainstream press coverage and the tell-tale emergence of so-called “business blogs” in addition to the existing personal ones.

Superficially, blogging can appear to be a narcissistic, banal and faintly ridiculous online sub-culture, but blogs have occasionally produced some excellent content and they have made a substantial contribution to our understanding of online interaction and socialisation. Most important, blogging has seen free software succeed where million dollar software has often failed – to engage people in collaboration, knowledge sharing and debate. Individual bloggers cite various reasons for this. Sam Ruby articulates two good reasons: weblogs act as “petri dishes” for innovation; and they lead to what he calls manufactured serendipity (“Google notices that there is a high correlation between the content of my weblog and this conference .  So I decide to go .”)

Others see in weblogging the seeds of a more meaningful and compelling form of online social interaction than we are currently familiar with. Sébastien Paquet of Université de Montréal, regards weblogging as a highly effective form of “personal knowledge publishing.” In an article on knowledgeboard (a good site, ironically based on a clumsy one-size-fits-all “online community” product ), he articulates a vision for online communities of this kind to act as a kind of cultural salon:

“Because they simultaneously fuel individuals' growth and cultural development, online communities will be embraced by culture-makers and evolve to become a major part of the process that is culture. It will happen simply because online communities give people more freedom to explore and cultivate their interests, and because they increase their ability to connect with like-minded people, as compared to previously available means. “

Even just on a technical level, the world of blogging is home to some of the simplest but most effective XML-based syndication standards , which should serve as a lesson to enterprise software developers everywhere. One of these innovations is the use of trackback links (aka pingback, linkbacks, etc.), which enable weblogs to track links created to their content by other weblogs and automatically link back to these citations, which is a very effective way of stimulating debate. Ruby discusses this in a more recent essay entitled Cohesion . This is a very interesting example of social software in action. So far, a relatively small number of people are experimenting with what this means and what it can do, but already it has had an unpredictable impact on dialogue, association and transmission of ideas within blogging communities. Some observers, such as Ben Hammersley , speculate that this technique may lead to emergent metadata as an alternative to fixed methods of site and content classification. In other words, with enough trackback-type links, we could define what a site is about by reference to its inward and outward connections to other sites.

Weblogging began as a personal publishing phenomenon, but organisations are just starting to see the potential uses of this technique to provide services, sell products, build brands and communicate with stakeholders. Ross Mayfield suggests some business blog ideas in this respect, and Business 2.0 carries a listing of some early business-oriented blogs. Beyond this immediate bandwagon jumping, which inevitably follows new Internet trends, good and bad, the potential impact of this form of online interaction and knowledge sharing has much deeper implications for the way we structure communication within and between organisations.

However, the important thing to understand about the evolution of online communication in general, weblogs included, is not just that the tools have got better, but that their usage is now starting to reach a qualitatively new level. The pre-condition for this change is achieving a critical mass of inter-connectedness between people and computing devices. In the right context and with enough general “connectedness”, the use of simple online communication techniques (such as those described earlier in connection with weblogs) can create network effects that spawn unpredictable, sometimes dramatic, emergent behaviour. Studying and learning form the dynamics at play under these conditions is vitally important if we are to pursue the goal of developing useful social online applications.