ETP's First Anniversary - Let's Look At The Community
Internet/Weblog Culture
12/4/2000; 9:45:14 PM

It's EditThisPage's first anniversary today, which is to say that this community has been running for a year now, give or take a bit. You start taking things for granted after a while, but take today and look around the community we've got!

I made some bold statements in my essay Weblog Communities, but looking around today, I feel vindicated, at least for the first year. ETP/Weblogs.com/ManilaSites (to draw the line loosely) is a community of at least hundreds of active members. I've been part of online communities this size, like Slashdot. But look around:

Where's the fueds? You can't have a community that size without fueds, spats, and fights... they don't seem to be here. (If they are, they're hidden well, and that's just as good.) There's a lot of respect around here. It doesn't feel massive... but if you stop to think about it, ETP/Weblogs.com/ManilaSites is pretty big. I daresay we're approaching real-world village size, gargantuan for an on-line community, and we're still going strong!

And we're functioning more like a real community then any online community I've ever heard of. I don't know everybody, just my "neighbors" (which I've selected by creating positive links to them, and having them reciprocated). I'm not forcibly exposed to everybody or nobody's viewpoints, just like in real life where if I don't like what you say, I can just keep walking. The list of people everybody knows is short; Mayor Dave Winer () is about the only person I figure everybody has certainly heard of.

Links to other weblogs are proliferating... I'm sure you can establish a correlation between how many links there are to other weblogs and age of the weblog. (This site's somewhat deceptive since I use the Weblogs.com site to only show recently changed sites... I think I have around 30 links total.)

Things are going remarkably well around here... if this keeps up, this community will be one for the record books and endless scholarly dissertations. Here's to another year like it!