Perhaps in my network, I see different levels of connection intensity, as it were.

Strong: I have a handful of people I interact with pretty regularly, like Michele. Those are stronger connections.
Medium: I have a bigger group of people I’ve interacted with several times, but maybe it’s less regular. These medium connections might be people I interacted with several times over the course of a few weeks but haven’t talked to in months since then.
Weak: I have a large group of weak connections. Some of these are blogs I read but haven’t ever directly talked to. I read Stephen Downes for months before I commented or emailed him; ditto for Jane Hart. Sometimes I might comment on a blog once but not subscribe. That happens now when I get trackbacks here. I try to go out and read any posts where someone links to me, and I often comment. Sometimes I also subscribe, but I have too many subscriptions already to add everyone to my list though. So I might have a weak connection to someone who reads my blog but I don’t read theirs.

Perhaps when I think of “community” online, I don’t see it as something with hard and fast borders. The edges are much fuzzier than that; it sort of gradually fades from strong to weak. I haven’t read any of Shirky’s work yet, so I can’t speak to that. However, I think I see the blogging community as being much looser and less uniform than we generally perceive face-to-face communities.

Deep philosophical thoughts for a Sunday morning.

Enjoyed your audit and do many of the same things you do. I liked your comment about blogging with the same folks to build community (which I do) but am also enjoying this challenge and meeting new folks like you. A question I think for all of us – which ties in with Shirky’s latest book – is at what point does a “communuity” grow to the point where you can no longer connect with everyone. I have 40 some blogs that I track with RSS…which to me can be managed. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Ah well. I’m not doing this to try to drive lots and lots of traffic to my site.

You always add to the conversations

Technorati picked up my post just fine, it just hasn’t made it to the wiki yet. Keep in mind that the RSS feed on the wiki is limited to only 20 posts, so not everything will actually appear there with the current settings. There are MANY more posts shown on Technorati than what the wiki is showing currently.

As for Google blog search, I’m not sure they’ve pinged me since I did this post. Google blog search is always 12-24 hours behind Technorati for my blog, sometimes more. I’ve had it not ping me for 3-4 days at a time before.

Thanks for the compliments. Glad I am adding to the conversations!

Now we do have a slight problem Houston. Even though you have added technorati tag comment08 technorati isn’t finding your posts. We have the RSS for this tag term coming into the wiki so if people use this page they won’t find your posts.

Now with my Edublogs blogs (which are wordpress) if I use their tags technorati is finding. The easiest solution for you is to add the words “And if you are part of The Comment Challenge remember to tag your posts “comment08″ in the text at the bottom of your post. This will definitely work because technorati searches within the body of posts for the search term.

Contact me if you need more explanation. And yes definite mutter (Google Blog search isn’t finding you either).

How many subscriptions do you have in your reader?