I am really fascinated by this discussion – and thanks to Robert for directing me to your site and the Smallweb blog.

I see the last post here is May 21 so am not sure whether it is relevant to add comments now. And I really should be getting on with some work anyway! But can’t resist adding a few thoughts.

I am really fascinated by the potential for creating and sustaining so many different kinds of communities whether they are thousands of miles apart or in the next street.

I realise I am already doing that with emails among my own family – it’s great when my sons and husband are in another country but it can also be an excellent way of communicating when they are in the next room!

More formally, I am just starting to use another blog to explore the potential for making links between communities in my part of town (part of a multicultural network or as a friend Kimho Ip (http://www.kimhoip.com/) prefers to call it intercultural exchange).

But I also really like Robert’s idea of the tenement network which may one day produce a community garden – I know of several people who are already turning their backgreens into fantastic spaces. It could be great to create ‘green corridors’ between all these different community gardens in the city …

Lots more thoughts – the human need to keep in touch – the essential generosity of most bloggers. So I agree with other comments here, that you don’t need to filter your blogs for fearing of boring readers – though maybe that is because the technical ability to do that is simply beyond me!

Readers always have to decide what they are trying to get out of a text themselves. I actually read this post and my thoughts were more in the "Oh look mks making some friends in the UK I am so glad.." direction.

So if you had decided (with the help of technology) that perhaps I wasn’t interested in the small web I might not have seen this even though my real interest was seeing the new names showing up in your comment thread.

In the same vien;

You should stop worrying about being boring Mk. Interesting people are interesting even when they are "being boring" as the Pet Shop Boys have so aptly demonstrated.

Sorry to be pedantic, and don’t listen to anything Dougie says – he’s a troublemaker

A good, relevant title will let me know what the content is, and I’ll manually click on to something else if I know it is not going to affect me. If I have time I may read it anyway. Either way, the choice lies with me, leaving the blog owner to concentrate on providing the content that they wish.

Part of the essence of blogs is that they are personal things. There’s no suggestion that the reader should dicate editorial content in a manner that may be relevant to the MSM.

For my tenement group (which is btw the only one which I, personally, maintain), disseminating major decisions and essential information via a printed letter is easy – I know where everyone lives!

This is not so easy when alternative methods of communication are not available. But surely there comes a point where you need *some* kind of technology or tool in order to participate. We teach people to read for that reason, and everyone has a postcode for that reason too. I don’t have a problem with putting in some basic, minimum requirements for participation. Literacy, and an e-mail address seem pretty good low-watermarks for the kind of communication we do (as you say, that includes homeless people, and the disabled). If you fail to use these methods, you simply are not communicating, and will be penalised as a result… just as you’ll begin to lose friends when you fail to return their calls.

To repeat the point above, with reference to my relations on a Gap Year in Africa – The problem may not be lack of access, but too much! Sometimes, its nice to get away from it all. In the past, you could simply NOT pick up your phone and people would assume you weren’t in the house. Failure to respond to a text message or mobie phone voice-mail within a certain time is seen as disrespectful. We may need to go into communications black-spots, in African plains or Scottish Islands, just to get away from it all.

As for the access issue that Dougie brings up, I think that while it’s a valid point it also is less of an issue than we might think it is at first blush… if people want connectivity they will find it, somehow. I was surprised to discover (this is back in Canada) that many homeless teens have email addresses, but then I was told "well of course, there is free internet access at the library" and it all made sense. It would be, in fact, easier for a homeless person to have an email address than a mobile phone.

Homeless people can be bloggers too, as we can see with the UK’s very own Wandering Scribe.

This is not to downplay the access issue but rather to point out that if you wanna be online, you will find a way to get online.

I live in a development of 70 flats, of whom only about 10 are so far partakers of the yahoo group I set up, though all were invited. Of those who haven’t joined the group, I don’t think they know what they are missing, frankly, and I guess it’s their loss. Living in central London with an internet cafe round every corner, one couldn’t argue that they didn’t have easy access if they wanted it. In terms of keeping them in the loop, on "important" matters, there is a management company and freehold company for the official stuff, and when we have our summer garden party, those not online will be creating extra work for me, who will no doubt have to make and deliver paper invitations. As far as discussions about broken security gates, burglaries, tree-pruning, car-parking and the like, the non-members will presumably get their info by word-of-mouth like they always have.

Also, I don’t think you’d need another blog for the Montreal stuff, the categorisation feature of blogs means that people who don’t care about Montreal are free not to click on the Montreal category link. And people who don’t have a personal interest, but still want to know what interests you, or what’s going on in far-flung places, then they’re free to browse it if they want to.

I think the issue is about your fear of boring people, which personally, I think is their lookout.