Danah writes that blogging is a privilege, with preference to straight white males. Maybe at the top of the Technorati popularity charts. But take a look at the participants on Austin Bloggers and Austin Stories, the blog and journal portals. Core community members are women, queer, stay-at-home moms, workers in social work, teaching, non-profit, retail, tech-support, students, and job-hunting. This is a community, not a country club.
Posted by alevin at January 8, 2004 11:12 AM | TrackBackAdina - i'm definitely trying to tease out more of what i'm getting at so i'll refrain from trying to clarify.
But, given that you've pinpointed an explicitly diverse and visible community, how do you engage that group to help direct where the blogging technology goes so that the technologists help mee their needs to?
Posted by: zephoria on January 8, 2004 12:46 PMThe Austinbloggers and Austin Stories portals were developed by local, technically inclined folk (Austin Stories is Greg Bueno; the AustinBloggers group includes Chip Rosenthal, Adam Rice, David Nunez and me).
That's one of my favorite aspects of Social Software -- a lot of the innovative work is done by people in the community, responding the the community's needs. It's a new trend in open source development -- a lot of early open source work was by geeks, for geeks. Social software has open source innovation for non-geeks.
Austin in particular has a strong culture of geeks working in the community. There are eight cafes with free wireless within several minutes of my house, because the AustinWireless community group has a project to "unwire" local meeting places.
The Austinbloggers get called upon pretty frequently by people building community blog sites in other regions. Seattle has a lovely blog portal, and NYC has a nifty portal based around a subway map.
Not sure what this all means in theory, but I see it working in practice.
Posted by: Adina Levin on January 8, 2004 01:03 PMGood point, but I can think of a counterexample: the highly polarized conflict in Venezuela over the Hugo Chávez regime* seems to be represented in the blogosphere almost exclusively by the anti-Chávez camp. I'm not saying there isn't plenty to be upset with Chávez about, but he also has plenty of supporters -- in all probability more than half of the population of the country -- and you'd never know it by reading Venezuelan blogs. That has a lot to do with who in Venezuela has access to the Internet (and other prererequisites, such as literacy).
If this effect is less pronounced in the US then that's a good sign about the state of democracy and social justice in this country. But it might be an overstatement to claim that we're free from the effect entirely.
* http://aprendizdetodo.com/movies?item=20040111