Blogging Tribe: A Social and Blogging Experiment Looking for Volunteers [en]

[fr] Recherche de volontaires motivés pour une expérience socio-blogueuse.

Here’s the idea: form a group of bloggers, who agree to blog regularly for a certain amount of time, and read each other.

Scale? A dozen bloggers or so. From a dozen posts a month to one a day on average. For three months (or six? or six weeks?).

Why?

One of the things I understood while reading Here Comes Everybody, and which was missing from my global thinking about the connected world we live in, is the question of scale. That with more, comes different. Small group dynamics are not the same as large group dynamics. Small networks do not behave the same as big ones. At one point power laws kick in, and large groups or networks become fundamentally “unbalanced”.

Clay talks about the early blogging communities in his book, and I’ve understood what we feel we have “lost”, we bloggers of old: we’ve lost the small group dynamics, where we all read each other and there was a ball in the air that we all kept in movement.

I’ve seen that feeling reappear during the two “Back to Blogging” challenges I threw at fellow bloggers. For the ten days the challenge lasted, we started reading each other again, responding to each other in comments and even in blog posts.

So, I’d like to do this on a slightly larger scale. Larger not by the number of people, but larger as far as the dynamics are concerned. “Back to Blogging” has made a little foam appear in the egg whites we were beating — I want to try and turn the jug that holds them upside down.

Unlike Back to Blogging where I set the rules and dived in with what amounts to “qui m’aime me suive”, I’d like us to hash out the precise details together.

If you’re interested in this experiment and contemplating taking part, please get in touch with me. I’ll set up a quick mailing-list or Facebook book so we can all discuss the specifics and get the ball rolling.

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23 thoughts on “Blogging Tribe: A Social and Blogging Experiment Looking for Volunteers [en]”

  3. Comme tu ne manques pas d’idées et que tu as la plume facile, tu as juste besoin d’un peu de pression du groupe pour que tes écrits passent de ta tête à ton blog. Je n’ai pas cette chance : la gestation est longue, l’accouchement difficile, et je n’ai pas 15 idées de post en attente pour en produire une dizaine par mois (OMG !!!).
    Je me réjouis donc déjà de lire les articles de la petite équipe qui te rejoindra, et qui sait, d’y trouver une ou deux idées sur lesquelles rebondir pour mes propres posts bimensuels.

  5. Allez, je serais bien partante, mais avant quelques questions…
    – Est-ce que je peux blogguer depuis mon site d’écriture plutôt que mon site perso?
    – Que faire si un blog ou plusieurs ne m’inspirent pas de commentaires?

  6. L’idée c’est qu’on va discuter entre gens intéressés de comment on goupille le truc. Donc après, faudra voir si la formule qui émerge te convient ou pas — pas besoin d’un engagement ferme à ce stade, juste un “suis intéressée” 🙂

  10. Funny that you start this now. Im about to switch from IOS to Android and thought it might be amusing to dust off my blog to document my migration.

    Im in!

  11. I’d like to take part, if possible. I enjoyed “Back to Blogging” which helped me get a little momentum back into my own blogging.

  12. I would love to take part… but I am worried I will let everyone down.
    Plus, my French is far too rusty to swear that I have read everyone’s blog post.

    I’m not sure.

  13. Andrea: don’t worry, the idea is not to force ourselves to read everything that everybody else is writing. The idea is to put effort into creating a certain dynamic. It’s the spirit that counts, not the letter. I don’t care if people don’t read everything else that’s published, but the idea is that we make an effort to keep an eye on what other tribe members are publishing. If one person flakes out, it doesn’t jeopardize the whole experiment. I also want us to discuss exactly how we’re going to go about this before we “launch”, so that we have a shared vision of what we want to achieve. So if you’re interested so far, I’m counting you in. This is not a hard commit, this is a “commit to be interested enough to talk about it”. Sorry if my post wasn’t clear about that.

    Anthony: I’ve added you to the list!

    People interested so far (no links, sorry): Adam Tinworth, Euan Semple, Suw Charman-Anderson, Thomas Vanderwal, Nathalie Hamidi, Thomas Knoll, Goldie Kuatsu, Ton Zijlstra, Gerard van Schip, Andrea Vallejos, Anthony Mayfield.

    I think the best place to hash this out is a Facebook group, I’ll create one once we have 1-2 more people interested!

  16. I too am worried I will let the group down, but please pencil me in.

  18. Yeah, I’ll give it a go! I really do need to blog more, though I also need to figure out what Strange Attractor is for these days.

    I do have one request though – can we co-ordinate anywhere other than Facebook? I don’t use it on a regular basis, so I’ll miss everything if we do it there. 😀

  20. It’s going to be short-term coordination, and I think it’ll happen on Facebook, as almost everyone is in there all the time… sorry! (But I see you manage to creep in for Going Solo every once and a while, I’m sure you’ll manage to creep in for a few discussions about the Blogging Tribe!)

  22. Squeezed you in, Christine!

    Note to future interested by people: by all means make yourself known. However, as the whole point of this is to do an experiment with a small-scale community, we have to cap it at some point. I will be keeping track of other interested people for if anybody drops out and frees a spot. If there are enough of you, we can also get a second tribe started. So ping me if you’d like to join.

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