Blogging Systems has been developing community blogging platforms for a while now, trying to help different people nurture a sense of community and share common ideas. It seems our team is way ahead of the bell curve on the official 2007 findings of the University of Southern California’s Annenburg Digital Future Project.

Some great bullet points-

“Online communities are the future of our economic, political, and social lives.”

”Development and leadership of online communities is critical to the future success of a wide array of industries, including communications, marketing, political campaigning, advocacy, social networking, professional networking, intellectual property, entertainment law and management, nonprofit management, social support and illness support, and healthcare, to name just a few."

• 43% of online community members say that they feel “as strongly” about virtual community as real-world community.
  
  
• 20.3% of online community members say that they take action on behalf of online communities that they belong to.
     
• 64.9 % of online community members in a “social cause” indicate that they were unaware of the social cause before they began participating on the net. (meaning they were recruited through the net!)
   
• Over half of online community members log in once a day and 70.4 % say they sometimes or always interact with other members while logged on.
     
• Internet users report having met an average of 4.65 friends on line whom they have never met in person; they report they actually meet 1.6 online friends in person.
     
• 42.8% of Internet users say that going online has increased the number of people they regularly stay in contact with; this number has decreased slightly from the 46.6% who said the same thing in 2002.

So the question we further define as we design dynamic community portals is how to draw visitors into the user-centric experience that defines a relationship. It takes repeated motivational, intellectual, and emotional cues before a visitor feels they are part of a “community” either in the real world or online.

The essence of our online communities seems to be touching deeper and deeper. Over the next few years I suspect that we will see exceptional growth in all of the above areas, and we will also see that our geographic communities redefine themselves using informational connectivity rather than spatial connectivity.