I am always amazed by the number or size of communities on the internet. Blogs are bursting to life at an unbelievable rate: I've read somewhere that a new blog is created every 2 seconds. Myspace.com with its millions of users is another fine example. This site allows you to create your own profile and share thoughts, photos, etc. I am personally using Linked-in to publish my professional profile, keep in touch with my old colleagues or find new opportunities.
It is interesting to notice this need for people to belong and to have an identity on the web. I was reading an article on Le Monde (in French only) about this phenomenon. The author was pointing out that a few decades ago people tended to stay close to the place they grew up in, thus living in their own community. However, nowadays it has become common for people to live in different cities and even different countries - just look at how many foreigners are living in London - that this close-range connection is lost. But the web is there to remove the physical boundaries and allow people to virtually connect and stay in touch with each other.
Given the cheer number if these online communities you can always find the right one for you but although one could ponder whether this new form of social interaction is really a progress, I am more concerned about the difficulty to keep up and the lack of centralized repository of information or lack of interoperability between these profiles. If your friend John is on myspace but your other friend Paul uses friendster then you need to create an account on both sites and maintain your profiles up-to-date. I guess - read hope - soon we'll see more cooperations between all these services.
In a next blog I will discuss a bit about web semantic as it could be solution to the problem I just mentioned.
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