Remember Ricky Nelson's great song, Garden Party?

"But it's all right now, I learned my lesson well.
You see, ya can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself"

You may not. Ricky was the precursor of the whole "rock star" thing. With more than 50 Top 100 hits, Nelson was second only to Elvis Presley as the most popular rock and roll artist of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Today, he's nearly forgotten.

You might have noticed the modest dustup following Digging v1.24, the one about relative traffic rankings. People postured, pontificated and pronounced. Bottom line? Lots of critics but no hard factual alternatives. Lots of smoke, very little fire.

This is what community is about sometimes. The game of "I'm outraged by your outrage" tag is fun to watch and miserable to be the object of. In lots of cases of swift boating, the whole object is character assasssination. In the muddle of "I'm ok and your not'", online denizens beat the crap out of each other self-righteously.

If I could have anything I wanted on RecruitingBlogs.com, it would be more rumbles (not more Borborygmus, more street fights). I love the West Side Story feel of a good gang fight and think that reenacting them online gives the place a real urban feel. Now that many of us have a little time on our hands, it's good preparation for the coming apocalypse in which we ride spiked motorcycles and have sword fights in a hellish pace.

Well, maybe not. There's a kind of online communication that generates no benefit but takes enormous personal bandwidth. I don't like it much...grumpy self-righteousness about things that don't matter isn't my spot. I'm actually a little closer to the posturing without performing group who pounced om those traffic pronouncements.

The point is that building community takes great energy and great tolerance. Living together when we annoy the crap out of each other is where the challenge and opportunity lie. It's easy to get along with the folks who eat the same dogfood you do. It's hard to accept the people who enjoy pointing out that it actually is dogfood. It's harder still when they don't admit that what they eat is just a different brand.

The place is blossoming. You can tell a real community because it contains some people you don't like very much and you still hang out there.