Thanks for the feedback. The point that I probably need to clarify is that by definition “community” is differentiated from “interest” by our identification with the interest. “I am a Twitterer”.

To that extent there are large number of people who do identify with being Twitterers and therefore are by definition a community.

That said, yes our current vocabulary/taxonomy is ill equipped to describe the stratification of communities based on thresholds of interaction and value. I will put a bit of thought on it at some point. In the mean time if anyone else has an idea how to communicate what we are getting at, please join in.

-Marty

So a few points:

Twitter is a tool. I understand your point about Twitter itself being a community, as well as the @somebody “communities”. Generally I have a hard time saying that Twitter and/or Twitter followers are a “community”. I think that defines the word community so broadly that it makes nearly any collection of people a “community”.

The main problem with Twitter as a community is perception. My wife doesn’t perceive her (very minor) actions on Twitter to be distinct from the larger society. In fact, Twitter as a tool is specifically NOT meant to separate itself from the larger society.

At the end of the day, your point that we need a common vocabulary is spot on. The first task there is to figure out how many “things” we’re talking about… namely that we might need 4 or 7 or some number other than 1 to define and refer to the various things we call “community”. When we define it as simply a replacement for the word “group”, the definition and thus its usage fails us. I think this is why you mentioned that you didn’t see a threshold for activity on Mack’s site… we’re talking apples and oranges. You’re talking about things like “The Intelligence Community” (which make up anyone and everyone in the world who has at least a loose interest in intelligence gathering and analysis), and I’m talking about something more specific (groups that take some amount of action, know each other on at least a minor deeper level, and spend some amount of time in the same virtual/physical space).

I agree that we do share a common interest if we have elected to follow Scoble. The question is whether we identify as being Scoble followers?

I doubt most of us consider ourselves a distinct subset of society based on reading Scoble’s blog or watching a specific TX show. Broadcast media does not necessarily a community make.

That said if we were all to join the Scoble online community to share this identification then I might agree.

Either way you are right that this is the part where its starts to become fuzzy. Are we individuals or have we elevated to the level of a common interests? Where is the delineation between group, family and community?

Still regardless we have at least one set of criteria to start with. Who wants to pick up the torch and shine a light on the stratification of our vocabulary describing groups and community?

-Marty