Joshua Ellis (of both ZenArchery and MarginWalker) writes about ‘taste tribes’ in Mindjack.
I’ve been using Usenet and mailing lists and the ‘net in general to find the people that share my arcane interests (deep house music, or dual-purpose/supermotard motorcycles, or Nikon camera users, or Acid-jazz music, etc.) so it feels very obvious to me. Most of the people that I share information with online I have never met and I will probably never meet. But the quality of the information that they share with me and the immediacy of that information, is what is really valuable. Joshua puts it all together very clearly and it is a great read.
Mindjack – Taste Tribes
A great example of this is that I have started to use Discogs.com to track my music purchases. For people who love electronic music, Discogs is really an invaluable service because it has such detailed information about such a niche product.
One of the great features of Discogs is the ability to mark albums/singles as those that you own or that you would like to own. I had a gentleman from Germany contact me to let me know that he had a record for sale that I had wanted. I paypaled him the money and he sent me a rare record from the mid 1990s that I have never seen for sale. This is the kind of thing that is normal and everyday for people who use Ebay and who spend time on the net, but just thinking about how I would have found this record before the Internet and Discogs makes my head spin.