Online communities - is it where it's really at?

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Flickr: A community of people listening to speechesFurther to the discussion I had with Darryl, Richard and others during the week around how to make a site not just 'sticky' but something to return to, the new Public Address Sytem (launch announcement) is a very good example of a website ('blog') endeavouring to explicitly create a community around its content.

I have, of course, signed up ... still awaiting the email confirmation.

It will be interesting to see how well it grows and manages to maintain (as I would imgine the intention is) the community spirit. If it all works I wonder to what end?


On another subject I had to eat humble techno-pie this morning with a great mate that stated the NZ company he works for was about to launch a mobile phone service using a downloadable Java applet. "That'll never work [sited previous examples]!!!" I then got home to the news that Google has just released its Java mail app for a gazzillion mobile devices (Google blog posting) ... *blush* You will all know what the 'new service' is once the ads start to appear!

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