Matt Mower has posted some interesting thoughts on community formation in blogspace :
The analysis of common links whilst interesting unfortunately does not address the central problem of finding your community since, if you are already linking to the same sites, it is quite likely that you are already homing in on the community. This may be just telling you what you already know!
Your membership of a BlogPlex should be implied by posting something, anything. The semantic content of your posting defines the BlogPlex that you create (or joins it if it already exists) and new members of a BlogPlex can be automagically hooked up. [ Curiouser and curiouser! ]
I think he's right to suggest that group membership is becoming a more fluid concept than it traditionally has been. Or perhaps that's the wrong way to put it. In ordinary social life, groups can be transient and implicit as well as long-lived and explicit. The only tool we've had for ephemeral and spontaneous group formation is email. That will surely change, and the flurry of social networking experimentation we see all around us suggests that the evolution is now underway.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/06/10.html#a291