It has created the position of communities editor, to be filled by new media columnist Mathew Ingram, who has been with the site since its inception in 2000.

From Ingram's blog (posted Nov. 3):

What does that mean exactly? To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure.

As far as I’m concerned, it means a chance to apply some of those Web 2.0, “media is a conversation,” social-networking principles (the kind we started the mesh conference to talk about) to the newspaper that I work for, instead of just writing about what other content producers are doing. We’re talking about blogs, comments, interactive features, Twitter, Facebook, and much more. Some attempts will fail. Others (hopefully) will not. The reality is that creating communities doesn’t happen overnight.

In fact, I would argue (and have argued) that it’s impossible to actually create a community at all, despite the fact that legions of companies are desperately trying to do just that. To use a real-world analogy, you can build houses and lay sidewalks and plant trees, but you can’t create a community — that’s something that happens organically, if you have all the right ingredients. What are those ingredients? I don’t think anyone has the answer to that, which is part of what makes it so fascinating.

When it comes to the Globe, I think that compelling, thoughtful content and commentary is a pretty good starting place for growing a community, and judging by the response since we launched comments on all of our news stories (the first newspaper in North America to do so, as far as I know), lots of other people think so too. I’m hoping we can build on that. But it’s going to take work, and more than a little risk as well.

As I told the senior editors at the Globe, in order for us to do this properly, we need to be committed to opening up our content in ways we haven’t even thought of — including some ways that might seem strange or contentious, and which could at least initially be met with considerable internal resistance. Among other things, we need to make it easier for people to find our content, share our content, link to our content and even make use of our content (in some cases to create their own content).

To me, that’s part of what “social media” means, and it’s the kind of thing that true communities take for granted.

Are we ready for that? To be quite honest, I don’t know. I hope so. But the reality is that unless we are sincere in our efforts, then we might as well not bother. As I said when I accepted the job, if what we’re talking about is creating the appearance of conversation, a Potemkin village that creates the illusion of a community, or using social-media tools solely to spam readers with advertising, then we have already failed. Creating a real community is infinitely harder — but I think it can also be substantially more rewarding, and that’s what I’m hoping to work towards.