Mind-Manual

The Internet

I think the benefits of the Internet has been trumpeted far and wide already, but I would like to add my little bugle to the fanfare. I am referring to how the Internet has helped small and niche communities come together and grow. The Internet has helped interested people come together, made it easier for others to join, created viable businesses, and created a new medium of distribution and creation.

If you have an interest in something, odds are there is a website out there. Out of all of those websites, odds are there is one with forums to foster a community in. In that way, people who have similar interests from around the world–especially people who would not have talked otherwise–can now come together and enjoy their object of interest. For example, trials. People from all around the world post at observedtrials.net, I’ve seen people post from Russia, from Spain, from France and they all share their unique views on the trials scenes in their respective lands. These sites and forums are also an important way for people to schedule rides and meet up with people who live far away; again: these are people you might not have otherwise met. I met people from Mississauga, from Kingston, from Oakville and from Richmond Hill because of rides organized on the Internet. It really helps people that share a common interest come together and enjoy it.

Of course, these sort of communities also help younger or more inexperienced members learn quickly from others. This makes it much easier to join the community and become proficient at the point of interest. Let’s take value investing here because there’s a number of senior members who have been investing for many years who can help beginners in a number of ways. From explaining how to do certain calculations to stock picks, seniors help make the learning curve much shorter thereby encouraging more people to learn about investing.

The thing about niche communities and activities is that the people are often geographically distanced from each other. Let’s again take the example of trials. An only-trials shop in the Toronto region would not be viable at all because there just aren’t enough riders to keep the shop open. However, an online shop benefits greatly because it’s cheaper than a real shop, and because it can access many different geographically-disparate markets. Hbtrials.com, webcyclery.com and thetrialsinshop.com are prime examples of this.

The main feature of any trials site is now user-created videos. Distributing these videos between riders would be hell and likely very unprofitable. Even videos from world cups and from top riders would be difficult to distribute without the Internet, because most of the riders would not even know that they existed simply because it’s such a niche product. At the same time, trials riders enjoy videos from all over the world, from varying levels of riding and varying levels of videographic quality. Because of this distribution channel, more videos are being created. The ever-dropping prices of video equipment and online storage space also helps a great deal in this spurt of video creation. Occasionally, people are sponsered solely by videos, because of the exposure great videos get in such a geographically diverse community.

Whereas before it was difficult to get quick answers to questions, to learn or to simply mingle and discuss a hobby or interest, it has gotten much easier to do such things through the advent of the Internet because it is geographically-neutral, cheap and ever malleable.

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