Welcome students of the university of Manitoba, who appear to be studying this site as part of some coursework. Why do I feel like I’m in a petri dish?

That reminds me. Yesterday, on a mailing list, someone mentioned that the GBlogs portal had shut up shop. In the course of his question he said, “Does this signal the end of the ‘community’ project?”

As an academic, supposedly researching blogging and bloggers in the UK for the last two years, I was disappointed to realise that the author had failed to grasp even the simplest concept - it wasn’t a project. It was a way of making it simpler to contact and identify each other. The community - all the conversations, the portals and the gizmos grew organically from the community - not the other way around.

In 2000, the mailing list started because a blogger from the Netherlands was coming over during the summer, and a few personal publishers wanted to organise a drinks thing to meet her. Rather than firing mails all over the shop, thirteen people set up a mailing list, and then met up in a dingy pub in King’s Cross in June. From there, it grew.

The portal was created around the community, rather than the other way around. At no point did anyone sit down and decide to create a community. The community was already there.

Plus the addition of inverted commas to that question makes the whole ‘community’ seem to be a subject of doubt or disdain. Now, I’ll admit that I’m not the fan of jolly blogmeets that I once was (too big now, too hard to organise, too many egos and attitudes in the room at once), but there was definitely a community there at some point, though not a pet project, and not an engineered one. Spontaneous.

When people do something they enjoy (like, say, blogging) which is fundamentally an individual pursuit, when they eventually decide to get together and meet up, that’s community. If I wanted to start up a standing-on-one-leg-in-the-rain community, would you join? Not unless you were already interested in standing on one leg…