Through your book 18 Rules of Community Engagement book, and the way you’re not only teaching others, but you’re you’re also providing an excellent example of the success principles involved in online community building.

Thanks for the concise grounding in online community building that you offer in your book. I look forward to our interview this evening, http://tinyurl.com/AngelaC.

Roger

I spent about 90 minutes today writing a post to my posterous blog – where I’m collecting stuff that falls between the lines of business and personal – in a lifestream. I haven’t posted the substantive interview I did last week to my business blog because things have been moving so fast over the last five days I haven’t had time. But, interestingly, I found time to post to the posterous lifestream today. Why? For all the same reasons that Steve Rubel outlined in his “apology” for converting his regular blog to a posterous stream just a few weeks ago.

Here’s a link to that post: http://www.steverubel.com/its-official-i-am-moving-from-blogging-to-lif

What’s most provocative about this topic for me is that I’ve truly been studying my thinking as I go back and forth between posting on the posterous and posting on my wordpress biz blog for the last 3.5 months or so… And I keep wishing I felt comfortable integrating both blogs into one platform… If I did it (maybe I should say when I do it…) it’s much more likely that I’ll follow the same route Steve’s taken than that I’ll punch the posterous blog up into WordPress.

Would love to hear what you and others think about Steve’s posting… and his attempt to bridge the gap between real-time and asynchronous conversation with a “lifestream” style blog.

I think we all need to take our brains in for a metaphor-change pretty soon. A few weeks ago John Borthwick published a thoughtful piece called The Rise of Social Distribution Networks and in it he called for updating our thinking about the web from static and mostly one-way metaphors drawn from publishing and architecture (pages and sites) to streams.

(You can read the whole piece here: http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-the-rise-of-social-distribution-networks-2009-5)

The points Borthwick makes are not just abstract distinctions. They helped me see that we have an opportunity to process real-time and asynchronous lifestreams together – but differently.

We have to approach streams differently than we do pages or sites in order to get benefit from them. We dip our cups into streams when we need a drink (or take a plunge if we need to get wet all over) but the stream runs with or without us, 24/7. We don’t “master” streams and we don’t “comprehend” them, either. The real-time web is like a stream.

On the other hand, asynchronous conversations, including blogs and other kinds of content libraries, can be studied and reflected upon and noodled around and continued over time.

I can’t imagine any of us are going to be able to squeeze blogs and other kinds of deep content into the real-time web…not any time soon anyway. And I sure don’t want to see any of the thought leaders I’m learning with sacrifice the asynchronous parts of the ongoing conversation for the streaming parts, either.

This is a provocative topic! So glad you posted on it…Would love to hear what others are thinking about this crucial subject too… Fascinates me!