with eyes tied behind his back

I read your comment at 2:30am and had to go over this line, like, 4 times before laughing out loud.

The rest of your comment made of sense, but of course I'll beg to differ.

No Flickr user ever *made* any part of Flickr, no fon user *made* the fon product; they simply use it, and by using it extend the "community of user".

This brings us to the content vs. infrastructure debate (where's Mike?). Flickr as an "infrastructure" - with image notes and APIs and machine tags and geolocating - is, on its own, useless. It wouldn't be Flickr if it weren't for the thousands of users who host their photos on it every day. And yes, by doing so, they extend the user base of Flickr - the "pool of customers". The medium has become the premium, as well as the message.

To me, community is about sharing - experience, resources, work, struggles, whatever. We've all tasted Pepsi before. We know what it tastes like, what it smells like, and what it sounds like. When a stranger sitting next to us opens a can of Pepsi, and we hear the "pffft!" and "fzzzzz" of the can and carbonation, then watch them lift the can to their mouth, tilt it and drink the toxic brown liquid, are we partaking in their experience? Well, we're sharing a moment by witnessing something that we've felt before - something that's touched our senses. The same goes for Flickr - just because a stranger uploads a photo of a place I've never seen before, it doesn't change the fact that I'm only witnessing an experience = not partaking in it. I submit that if you claim that one of these is a community, then you must accept that so is the other one.

People + interaction + communication = communty + culture.

Correction - "people" is arrogant. Howler monkeys, fire ants and wolves have been building communities since long before we walked on two legs - and will continue to long after we've faded into dust, along with all of our Flickrs and Youtubes.

The very definiton of "community" implies something that's at a very low-level, perhaps primal even. It's a phenomenon that starts from the ground-up - not from the top-down. The idea that we need corporate entities to come in and create / organize our communities for us is madness. They want us to believe that we need them for our online communities to thrive. We don't. We've (the human race and/or internet users) always been a community of organic, self-healing communities of every size and stripe imaginable. We've been able to sustain these communities through voice, art, signs, work, and play - your "interaction + communication". To think that we now need corporate structure to rigidly define how we configure our communities is to sell ourselves very short indeed.