[from Caterina.net]

Stephen Downes:

What creates a community in the real world is proximity.... Same theme in social networking: Orkut, Friendster, even Flickr… you GO to a specific location on the web. He challenges that these are communities, there’s “proximity” (all on one site) but not community.

Two major elements of communities:

1. the network – elation in and among a group of people (not mere proximity)

2. semantics – the idea that these relations are about something – a topic, a value, an interest, a set of belief