Blogs may have just reversed the Internet

Online communities have been the topic of academic research for many years. However, as this paper shows, a lot of time has been spent on trying to understand why people do or don't participate. As I was reading this it suddenly occurred to me that blogs - and the RSS feeds which underlie them - have just reversed this issue. I belong to almost 200 'communities' but I never actively 'go' to them, my blog reader does all of that for me. This means that I can belong to many more communities than before, and only participate when there is something of value to me. It has distorted the model described in the paper, and will probably continue to change other assumptions which have yet to be formally recognised.