MeetUp’s have doubled in the past three months. They’ve built MeetUp 2.0, allowing MeetUps to have official moderators.

Scott founded MeetUp after reading “Joining one group cuts your odds of dying over the next year in half” in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.

The Net is enabling a new type of associations, different from unions, parties., etc. The new ones are local, persistent, with card-carrying members and advocates.

The Internet isn’t about changing the world. It’s about saving the world.

[As Susan Crawford says on the IRC: Yay optimism.]

Robert Putnam, author of Bowling alone, replies. We have “privatized leisure time.” Now we’ve been having the debate on the Net’s effect on communities for 15-20 years. It’s more interesting to ask how the Net can be used not to create some fictional [“fictional”???] commnity online but real face-to-face communities.

By far the evangelical Protestant movement is the best organized in the country. It’s the biggest counter-trend to the isolation I described in Bowlling Alone. MeetUp groups don’t have the intensity or commitment and social support of the “cellular church” model.

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