It’s about communication. You want to build a community? Build it around something to share (a focus) and conversation will emerge from that.
Link: Joho the Blog: Interests, not demographics.
In a Report in the 6 Jan 2006 Science Kossinets and Watts offered an empirical analysis of social network evolution in a large university community.
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The results show that at least in this particular environment, people were more likely to form ties with others when they had a shared "focus" such as a class that brought them together or a mutual acquaintance, but were less likely to interact solely on the basis of shared characteristics such as age or gender.
Gotta get that article.
Forward it on when you get it?
Jyri Ergstrom has said something similar in his blog. Personally, I think this is no different to the off-line world: when I was a wee lad, my mum always used to try to make me play with a kid from my school who lived nearby. But I wouldn’t want to – apart from age and gender, we had nothing really in common.