Mark eloquently restates some of the core advantages of Open Source, but it's interesting that his epiphany was so long in coming. It seems that "free enough isn't good enough" was a lesson he learned the hard way.

But the fact that he runs eleven blogs got me thinking: At that level of blogging intensity, what are the inertial factors that retard migration to a community-type system (GreyMatter, GeekLog, the Nukes, etc.)? Comparing installation, maintenance, and UI between best-of-breed systems on both sides of the publishing/community fence, I don't see show-stopping differences, but perhaps others do. On the other hand, I do see some clear advantages (cross-fertilization, multiple communication modalities, etc.) to community systems. Could it be plain old resistance to change, or are there some interesting cultural vectors at work here? Crossing the line from weblog to community changes the perspective: blogs are arguably egocentric, but hosting a community means relinquishing some of that control.

Thoughts?

One issue with community is the difference in overhead - it works for you only to the extent that you keep track of the broader conversation, and you have to do more work (I'm have rid my MT installs of spam multiple times per day, for instance, and that's just with this limited comment infrastructure).

It seems to me that the spam issue would be more dependent on access control and authentication of posters (easily available on both types) than on the type of underlying system. In my experience, even very simple (and easily spoofed) authentication dramatically decreases spamming and trolling, and it's arguable that this small "cost of entry" improves the quality of discourse (Powazek discusses this at length).

Certainly, running multiple discussions is a lot of work, whether they're topics in a Nuke or individual blogs. There's a huge amount of overlap between them, and each type of system has specific strengths for its intended purpose. I view community systems (purely talking about the underlying software here) as a superset of weblogs: You can set up and run a community portal to emulate a set of weblogs, but not the other way around.

But I do see some parallels to the control issues in the weblog/community dichotomy I alluded to above: smart vs. stupid networks (Isenberg), hierarchy vs. web, Cathedral vs. Bazaar, and a whole range of political/economic models. Or maybe I've just been reading too much Bruce Sterling lately.

This one makes sence "One's first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything."

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