A Posse, I Has One

By Jake • October 31st, 2008 • 8 Comments

The sadly unfortunate and untimely death of one of our own has me waxing philosophically about our “community”.

Those of us who blog about Oracle (or even just blog in general) form a loosely-coupled community of like-minded individuals, i.e. we don’t agree on everything, but we can all agree that blogging is important.

I’m impressed and a bit choked-up by how tight-knit our community is; we band together when one of our own is in trouble, has family emergencies or tragically dies way before his time.

Why?

I’m not entirely sure, since we sometimes violently disagree about technical minutia and blogging etiquette and just about everything.

Still, it seems all those beefs are put aside when one of ours is negatively affected; nobody circles the wagons like bloggers. Reminds me of an old Western posse, a willing one anyway.

I guess this is a form of a self-policing community, or is it possible that we all mutually respect each other?

This behavior speaks volumes for the power of an online community. We meet rarely IRL, so the strength of our community relies entirely on interactions through the ‘tubes.

Your thoughts welcome as always.


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  • http://talentedapps.wordpress.com Meg

    very nice post Jake. Carl's death really hit me hard. Thanks for writing these!

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    It's not been the best year; we've lost several people too soon.

  • http://www.oraclenerd.com chet

    I think you are absolutely right.

    My three highest weeks in terms of hits have been:
    1. When I was fired
    2. When I was laid off
    3. When Carl passed away

    I keep trying to get my wife to use some of these tools (blogging, twitter, etc) to help find friends. I constantly extoll the virtues of the online community.

    I can tell you that the support I received during number 1 and 2 was remarkable. I had never expected it. Looking back, I know it would have been a much more difficult experience had I been “alone.”

    I for one am thankful for the Oracle community. There are some great people here.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Figured you would agree :) It's not for everyone though; I think our community does well because we're loosely affiliated with a relatively serious topic. This helps with the content, and also gives us a common thread and experience.

    It helps to have that, otherwise it's too random.

  • joel garry

    It's not for everyone though;

    King of The Hill last night was spot-on, inappropriate use of myspace for a business.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    That quote doesn't appear in this post. Did you mean to comment on this one?

    Didn't see King of the Hill, but in this case, we're talking about a guy who used blogging and other communities to spread knowledge and good will about Apex. Not only because it was his job, but also because he had a passion for this stuff.

  • joel garry

    The quote is from you answering Chet. You had me going for a second :-)

    Anyways, it's common and cleansing to laugh (often inappropriately) after sad news, and that King of The Hill was pretty funny on the downside of social web passion.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Oh right, now I see it. I'm not ready to laugh just yet, but I know what you're saying.