OSW: Max Niederhofer - The Ludicity of Online Communities

Update: the slides for this talk are available online.

COO of www.20six.com - Europes largest blogging company.

Ludicity a word he made up, just means kind-of-playfulness.

Looking at why relatively young people (teenagers, early twenties) blog. They are the mass of bloggers.

They’re tech savvy, better educated than the mainstream. They spend a lot of time on the Internet (and so watch much less TV). Blogging is the perfect game - the perfect massively multi-user online role-playing games. But it’s a game without an end, you can’t finish it. But blogging isn’t really a game, it’s play. There are patterns to it, but it isn’t always the same - similar to playing chess.

The point of blogging is positive human interaction. It’s getting confirmation for what you’re doing, it’s getting love from other people.

It’s a virtual home.

From simple play, rules emerge. What rules have emerged from blogging? Transparency. Honesty. Respect.

Quick show of hands - who has a blog? About half of the attendees do. He asks that everyone who hasn’t tries starting one.

Questions

Tom Coates points out that a lot of the aspects he attributed to games are also attributes of life. Max agrees, but said that it’s easier to explain to people that blogging is fun, rather than saying blogging is like life.