DarrenBarefoot.com

Jeff: A fair point, but let me try to furnish a response. When I give talks about weblogs, I introduce them this way:

Weblogs are two things:

* A communications tool that has simplified personal publishing.
* A social phenomenon that started with geeks but is going mainstream.

I’m also fond of saying that I look forward to the day when we don’t have to discuss weblogs, that they’ll be as ubiquitous and normal as email. There was a time when everybody talked about email like it was manna from Heaven. We’re over that now, and I hope the same will happen with blogs.

That said, I’ll bet the first 20 people who had email accounts in a particular area (at a university, say) wanted to meet each other. Maybe if blogs become remotely as ubiquitous as email, we won’t be interested in having meetups anymore.

I think that bloggers are drawn to talk to each other because of the social phenomenon aspect. After all, they tend to be communicators, so it’s natural that they’d want to talk to each other.

To return to my tool vs. activity analysis, blogger meetups fall in the latter camp. They’re the same as any other hobbyist meetup–knitting, skydiving, pantsing–you name it. That is, they’re a gathering of people who are engaged in a common activity.

Tool user groups are one step removed from this, because they’re a gathering of people using a particular thing (for, presumably, varied purposes). I’m also skeptical because in an Apple or Mozilla group, people are meeting around a particular brand. It’d be kind of weird if, instead of a rock-climbing meetup, I held a Black Diamond (a hopefully-popular brand of equipment) meetup, wouldn’t it?

Admittedly, the differences are fairly subtle. Like I say, I shouldn’t judge–go forth and make merry with your tools.

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Donna, I have on occasion, become vaguely aware of some sort of ’snap-on’ mania.

The Snap-On guy - I wonder if he likes the company, or if secretly he is going crazy in that William Shatner ‘get a life people!’ kind of way.

:)

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There are plenty of tool-based get-together groups. Think of car or motorcycle clubs (MGs, VWs, DeLoreans, old Chevys, Mustangs, Harleys, Indians). Sure, that’s a lifestyle thing as much as a particular-tool thing, but so are Apple, Linux, and Mozilla get-togethers.

Anyone using a Mac or running SuSE or Firefox is in some way going against the grain, and will want to gather with others of at least some similar mindset. Especially because it might be hard to find kindred spirits everyday. You don’t need to hunt much to find someone else to commiserate with about the foibles of running Outlook on Windows XP–just try the next cubicle–but finding someone else who can help you master BBEdit or help with building a gzipped application source file takes some persistence, or a user group.

As far as the evolution of such groups, it follows a similar path. Adam Engst and Jon Pugh have hosted a “Netters Dinner” at Macworld conferences for years and years. Early on (1986), the number of people attending Macworld who used the Internet was pretty small. Now the list is limited to 300 attendees, and many people miss out—because who on earth would be attending Macworld and not have Internet access?

So there’s a little tool-based or activity-based group within another tool-based group, and one which has outlived its purpose in bringing a small group of similar-minded people together. It continues, but now it’s just basically a party.

Anytime people share an interest, they might form a group.

By the way, here’s a chainsaw club in Japan.

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