I just read this: via JOHO (David Weinberger) which points to this:

David Weinberger, January 2006 :: Rebecca Blood: Bloggers On Blogging

and it is one of those pieces that get me charged up about the sociological/communal stuff re: blogging, and its coming from one, David Weinberger, who is one of the “BlogFathers” in my own “blog journey”. Not that I needed convincing of what he and the other Cluetrain authors were saying, but they added quite a bit of urgency (at least for me) to the mix. They constantly called for companies to “get a clue” about the imnportance and neccessity of listening to the people for whom they were making products or providing a service.

Rebecca: from my perspective the community was much stronger in 1999, being so much smaller. You could actually know of most of the existing blogs, and realistically hope to follow a large percentage of them. So what is the quality that defines community for you? What was lacking then that exists now?

“ There are people I’ve come to know over the years either through their blog or through their comments on my blog. Some of them mean a lot to me. ”

Good point. The community wasn’t there for me (my note: in 1999 I assume). I felt I was blogging in the dark. No readers. No reaction. No sense of community.

For me, a community is a group of people who care about one another more than they have to. I do feel part of an ever-changing community of bloggers and readers. That’s not to say that everyone who ever glanced at my blog is part of that community. But there are people I’ve come to know over the years either through their blog or through their comments on my blog. Some of them mean a lot to me. And this is not a binary club that you’re either in or out of. It’s far smudgier than that, as it should be. There are blogs I read that I feel emotionally attached to written by bloggers I don’t know personally but about whom I’ve come to care. I’m more than a reader of them but less than a community member. It’s an extension of the attachment we feel to favorite printosphere writers, but the blogging world is more intimate and less guarded.

I think we need a new social norm whereby it’s rude to assume that someone has kept up with your blog.

How much traffic do you get?

I genuinely do not track it. I don’t have the slightest idea. I don’t have any meters in place and I never ever check my Technorati ranking or any of the others. I couldn’t give you a guess reliable within several orders of magnitude.

Why don’t you track it?

In small part on principle. In main part for pragmatic reasons. I would be affected by the numbers either way, and neither effect would be helpful. If I were a bigger person, I wouldn’t care. But I do. So I don’t check.

What principle?

That we shouldn’t be writing blogs in order to gain a mass market. And we shouldn’t be evaluating blogs and bloggers by how many people read them.

I have been half uninterested, because of the above reason, and half afraid to know (by the amount of comments I’ve been getting recently, it seems all the more likely that the number of readers is small)

I have to admint I’ve been a bit disappointed of late in the lack of interest in my working through (and posting of) the booklet “Becoming the Authentic Church”. I had gotten much less interested (although not in the least DISinterested) in theologizing and discussing Radical Orthodoxy and such, and very much concerned/obsessed/preoccupied with finding a place and a people and an opportunity to begin to experience some of what The Church of the Saviour community is wrestling with right now (and really, constantly, over the years, as they struggle to remain faithful and renewed and seeking the structures which make for the most radical formation as the People of God).

This is closely related to the kinds of things in the interview with David above. One, how much “commenting” is a sign or not a sign at all, of either the worth of this blog, or the quality of it? I recognize that the drastic cutback in “politcal ranting” I had been doing June 2004 through June 2005 will put i a dent in that right now. There are simply many more people blogging about frustrations with Bush than there are people seeking a church community that forms itself in ways that often run counter to sensaibilities floating in church life from extreme left to extreme right.

I have a feeling that this issue and the interview above, though, should be treated in separate posts, as either one in and of themselves can make for many many conversations.