More on Cultural Metaphors for Blogs as Front Porches :

• Seb points to Peter Kaminski's thoughts on Blogs as Front Porches
• Simon has this beautifully articulated piece on the Indian Tea Shops as a suitable Indian metaphor  :

"As places in which perspectives and understandings are traded, tea shops are sites for the production and consumption of views on the world. Tea shops service a huge range of personal, social, political and professional networks, through which somebody like myself, with few contacts, little local knowledge and a desire to know what was moving the city, could become orientated. While tea shops provided me with an important window onto the world of Varanasi, they also do this for their more permanent customers too.

.........To summarise (incompletely), here are some of connections between blogs and tea shops or coffee shops. They:

- have low barriers to entry (you don't have to buy tea to take part or post/comment to read/participate
- congeal or emerge around specific outlooks or perspectives on the world - attract fierce loyalty
- have a 'owner-patron' and audiences/customers who regard themselves less as customers more as members or even fellows
- are focal points in the public sphere: arenas where the pulic is both created and debated
- act as conduits though which private or domestic knowledge reaches out beyond its place of origination"

Read more about tea shops in an "ethnographically rich and theory lite chapter" (a few references to Habermas' thesis on the Public Sphere notwithstanding) from Simon's thesis. 

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