By kola bear
I have a work blog here which I wrote this post for - I intend to start posting work blogs here as well…
A friend of mine is a knitter. This is an actual friend not as opposed to those other “a friend of mine has a problem” friends. She loves to knit. She occasionally blogs about knitting and reads the blogs of other knitters. And she’s not the only one. There’s a huge, incredibly passionate, online community of knitters.
When one knitter (who was a photographer by day) wanted to create a photo-project of knitters sent out a request for participants, he was inundated with offers. This has led to the 1000 knitters project where he brings in knitters and photographs them as they knit a wool scarf, each person taking off where the last person finished.
The traditional image of old ladies being the only people who knit is apparently quite dated, despite advertisers telling us otherwise.
One of the interesting things about knitting is that it’s a very social hobby. The knitting circle is a centuries old entity where people (usually women both then and now) would gather together and knit and chat.
So why the blog about knitting? My friend told me about a website she frequents, www.ravelry.com, what she described as knitting 2.0. Unfortunately it’s in a closed beta so you can’t just sign up (I tried but there’s a huge waiting list due to its viral popularity). I did however borrow her log in and go have a shufty about. It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of a community-oriented web 2.0 site.
The members of the community are passionate and involved – they can set up and participate in groups and they can post their current knitting projects online for other s to view and comment upon as the project progress. They can rate the materials they use (the types of yarn and the patterns they work from) and compare their experiences of using them with those of others. You can easily find people who’ve worked on the same pattern and ask advice.
The point is that social networks do not have to be like the facebooks or myspaces of this world – with a goal of having everyone in the world sign up. A focused involved passionate community can be much more successful. Ravelry is successful because it’s a friendly, inviting community; where people are happy to help each other out (often complete strangers) because they have something in common or can relate to each other.
Leisa Reichalt mentioned that connecting to others comes from exposing just enough of yourself to allow others to relate to you; it doesn’t matter whether it’s about an interest in social networking ot knitting and it doesn’t have to be earth shattering or phenomenal.
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20th of November, 2007
You make an interesting point when you say that social networking doesn’t have to mean everyone in the world has to sign up. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be so sour about the concept. I’m tired of being told I have to sign up for Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace in order to be a Citizen of this Modern World. I wouldn’t have joined Ravelry if people had described it to me as Facebook for knitters. The idea of networking, after all, is about meeting people and finding something in common FIRST, then using your network to take over the world. What better way to start than to organise a networking community around a hobby?
(It should be noted that it was not intended to be a networking site, though that’s what it looks like from the outside. It’s meant to be a database. At its heart, it is still a database.)
It remains to be seen what the community will look like when everything shakes out — we’re up to 40,000 users and still not out of beta. Things in the community have changed a whole freeking lot, and they’re going to change again when the doors are thrown open. It remains to be seen whether it stays a nice, cozy community.
The rest — people being helpful and all — is a knitters’ thing, not just a Ravelry thing. This odd tendency to like a person just ’cause they’re unhealthily obsessed with wool seems to come with the territory.
20th of November, 2007
I am an avid knitter and a member of Ravelry. I applaud your insight and hope lots of people read it - knitting is as old as … well as people … people had to find a way to clothe themselves, and absent leather, created a method to weave / bind fiber together to make a garment or blanket or …
I also knit in a regular, weekly group - our members range in age from teenagers to grandmothers to great-grandmothers - I don’t know of many hobbies that attract such a dedicated following… it is international, interracial, intergenerational. Others could learn from the concept.
21st of November, 2007
Facebook didn’t start out as an undirected social network, but as a way to gather communities interested in each other by school / workplace. It’s only relatively recently that they have taken a leap towards a MySpace-style mass.
23rd of November, 2007
there’s a theory of design which is that you design for a really specific group and if you do that well, it might be adapted by others and changed in different ways to fit the different needs of other groups of people.
one of the best examples of this is the wheely bags that everyone uses o planes these days. They were originally designed just for cabin crew. but then others realised that they were really useful and did things to make it better for general public (like adding bigger wheels - better for travelling over rough surfaces like pavement). Facebook isn’t a bad digital example. And frankly it was better when it was more specific.