Yesterday, on my main blog, I wrote about the Daily Kos issue with the Observer.

Daily Kos recently shared an article in which the UK newspaper, Observer, stated (emphasis mine),

For many, they are the nerds of US politics: laptop warriors, with brains full of statistics, no social life and devoting too much time to arcane policy details.

Okay, what is it about social software that mainstream media does not get? It’s incredibly social. If the reporter had even ventured into the Daily Kos and read the comments, he would have seen a thriving, interested, and engaged community – which cannot be said for many offline communities.

What is this social thing? I don’t know about you but I love to get comments. I like to hear what other people have to say about what I write. I like to comment back to them and agree or disagree or set the record straight or expand on it. I like engaging people. That’s half the reason I write. I want to know what people are thinking.

I also like how small the world becomes when you blog. When people from all over the U.S. comment, it’s cool. When people from other countries around the world comment, that is amazing.

Blogs are tools that connect us.

I think it’s important for people to really understand what social networking is and what kinds of communities are built through social software like blogs, wikis, del.icio.us, flickr, or frappr.

Blogs can be anything the writer decides it to be. It can be a personal journal (although, the personal part of it is somewhat removed since it’s no longer that lock & key diary if it’s a true blog). It can be a developmental log. It can be a way to share information with like-minded community members. It is a chronological, frequency-based account. If you write it multiple times a day, daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly, it’s still chronological.

So, what does this have to do with social networking? It’s all about the comments and the ways blogs are designed. Take WordPress, for example. Inside the dashboard of the blog, they have links to other blogs. They show who is publishing what, when, and where. They share information. They share links to new themes or plug-ins or information that will be important to fellow bloggers. People then go to the links, make comments, leave feedback, leave their URLs and a connection is made.

What is really important is that in a community like Daily Kos, people are actually connected in a real and emotional way. During the YearlyKos, one member of the dKos administrative team lost his house to a drunk driver. The driver actually drove into the house. What is worse, is that the driver drove into the baby’s room. Had the administrator not been at YearlyKos, his family could have been killed. The readers of dKos rallied around him. They sent messages. They sent money. They sent condolences, support, and empathy. They reached out, as a community, to take care of one of their own.

How often can we say that about the neighborhoods that we live in?