Web 2.0 Mash-ups and the New Aggregators

Movement Building

The niche blogs that make up the QuakerQuaker community have created a whole new medium for talking about Quakerism. In just a few short years they’ve become more widely recognized in the established Quaker world. Bloggers are being invited to write for the major magazines and give talk at important national and international events. At the same time, isolated Quakers are now discussing issues with the detailed information that was previously only accessible to well-placed insiders.

The QuakerQuaker aggregator works not only by collecting post that would already exist but by passively encouraging new material. A blogger knows that there is a waiting audience for a particular type of post. The writer’s eternal worry—will anyone read this?—is alleviated by the portal’s existence. People are social beings and seek out communities. It is quite possible that a number of the current “Quaker blogs” would be devoted to other topics if not for the existence of the QuakerQuaker community.

The aggregator has also made the Quaker blog community much more visible to casual Internet user. One minor but heavily used feature is an email subscription list that lets users sign up for daily email summaries of newly-posted blog posts.

The rise of the blog networks are the start of new institutions that are less beholden to traditional resource limits than previous ones. The Internet makes it possible to communicate, organize, publish and even plan conferences without the infrastructure ...