William has a great post celebrating his 5 years of blogging. He says:
“What I never could have predicted was how personally transformative the experience would be. The online community of FI bloggers I have joined is amazing. Insightful, supportive, funny and helpful. I have grown to admire, respect and lean on these fine folks and consider them to be an important part of the social fabric of my life (most of them are in the “my peers” section on the sidebar of my blog’s homepage).”
This community is a very different realm and one, as William points out, that is experienced. There are some very interesting comments being made about social media, micro-blogging and the gamut applications that add up to this “experience”. It isn’t something that is easily understood but is defined by the “experience”. Just when we feel comfortable about a topic or how we are using an application it will change and challenge us. The “experience” is never static. And the boundaries of your personal and professional groups on-line seem to always be expanding and contracting with people. There is no solid definition of how or why it works. It just does.
That said it does mean the pundits, experts and “we can make a buck off this” types are always broadcasting some definitive measure about this “experience”. But as we all know nailing jello to a tree is pretty difficult. There is a Danish saying that talks about one’s love for family. The saying says something like ” it is difficult to divide the wind from the sun”. You can’t measure or distribute the love you have for your wife and kids. It just exists. And in that light this online experience, though measurable because it is digital, transforms the bits and bytes to a human experience. Sure you can get rich and famous with an application (just look at the US debates last night with Facebook showing up). But the key experience is being able to be part of a group, without geographic boundaries, in order to share just a bit of what we think and feel.
It’s great that more individuals are getting involved. No one really understands this until they do. Will someone come up with a name for all of this? I guess Jimi was asking the question years ago – Are you Experienced?
Tinfoiling 
Thanks Gene. You are an incredibly important part of my community, and I honestly don’t know if our paths would have crossed if not for these new tools.
I’m looking forward to learning from you in 2008.
I dig the Jimi reference. Being part of an online community really is something you know and feel, or don’t understand. It is a bit like trying to explain to somebody the connection between band and audience during a show, it can’t be explained, only experienced. I always heard musicians try to describe and quantify it, but I never got it until I was actually on stage making people move.