thoughtcrumbs

Perhaps MSN could have used a better example of community-building

Michael Connolly, project manager for MSN Spaces* on the sense of community engendered by blogs:

You take an event like the Halo 2 launch. Every single blog has this shared, communal experience of "I'm not gonna talk with my wife again for another 48 hours because I'm sitting in the basement." And we are all sitting in the basement, all playing Halo 2, all going through the same thing. And some friends of mine were blogging about eating Cheerios for dinner for a week when Halo 2 launched.

Perhaps he's a bit overly inclusive on his shared video game experience (something that never hit my radar, nor would it have really interested me), but I understand the sentiment.

A few years ago, World AIDS Day was commemorated through the online equivalent of A Day With(out) Art: hundreds of blogs went silent. Bloggers posted solid black screens or images of red ribbons pointing to Link and Think. Everyone was a part of this reflection en masse. Similarly, when Multnomah County started issuing same-sex marriage licenses, and when Willamette Week had an article about the best and worst blogs in Oregon, ORBlogs had a flurry of posts and cross-linking. In one case, history was being made in our own state, and in the other, we griped about the newspaper's mediocre choice of "good" blogs (or perhaps we were all just cranky at not being selected.)

*Blogger's evil new twin with non-validating markup and corporate ownership and censorship of individuals' posts. But there's plenty of chatter about that elsewhere.