Blogs, fwiw, could be considered a kind of community, but not the full-bore version of one as we’d like to imagine it. ;^) I only reference them as an example of (in most cases) low barriers to participation.

This is exactly what proves my point.

Certainly, lower the barriers to entry if you want ‘drop in’ comments and casual fly-bys, but if you are looking for a ‘community’, this is not the way to go.

Oh…and I don’t think there are many blogs we can actually call ‘communities’…unless they are dictatorial ones.

Good thoughts but I’m not on quite the same page concerning site registration… I’ve gone to comment in places before and then just not bothered because of registration requirements. Do I really need one more login for a site I may only use twice, or which promise “benefits” I don’t want? BugMeNot, here I come. Like your blog, mine, and 2 million others, I’m asked to leave my name and email address to comment… but I don’t have to sign up for anything. It’s impersonal only if I insist upon spoofing it.

For my part, referring to your first diagram, I think the visitor-to-customer shift needs to be made as easy as possible, and the customer-to-contributor shift only a bit less so. If the “difficulty” in moving from left to right in your diagram increases as you progress, I think it retains the value that you describe but means it’s easy to play in the sandbox and move on if you decide not to dig deeper. End result, higher quality membership in the passionate team members because you started with a larger sample. Quality and quantity are not always exclusive… sometimes it’s just a false dichotomy. The real insight is in the process of extracting quality from quantity.

I do agree that an increased barrier to entry tends to increase perceived value… to the point where based on your comments, I promptly headed off to The Well to see what that was all about. Still, this should happen farther to the right, not at first contact.

Totally agree. And because of this I’ve been noticing something very strange. If you remember reading Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger mentions the Web being able to bend and break time and space. Well what I’m noticing is that some of the best ways to create a real “feeling” of online community is by re-establishing these “barriers” of time and space.

BTW you might also find iA Design’s access rights diagram interesting in their article on Newspaper Wiki Schematics. I think it’s a good way to increase a users access rights the more committed they become in helping the community.

Also, what is “co-friending”? It must be obvious but I don’t have a clue.

I think the underlying issue is that its an asymmetric market – ie as a potential user I can’t tell which communities are great or cr*p from outside before signup (unless they are very well known), so to an extent I discount them all – and there are now a lot of them – so those with too stringent an entry barrier compared to the visible benefit (and the rest) will just get walked past in the main.