Tribe.net

So for those of you who are unaware, there is a social group called Tribe.net. Many belly dancers, particularly tribal belly dancers, are on this group and use it extensively for their dance needs - obsessions - joys - business. Unfortunately, it is not a really stable platform and periodically goes down. This causes all kinds of hysteria amongst the belly dance community as people contemplate loosing the easy access they have to communicate about belly dance.

This past weekend we had such an outage. It's back up - thank goodness - but it again poses the question for how long? What would we do if it falls and can't get back up? How would that change the face of belly dance? Not so much for the serious professionals, who are tied into the community in many ways, but for the hobbyists and the students who use Tribe to develop their knowledge and careers.

They (you know the proverbial "they") call this the information age and boy howdy they aren't kidding! A friend and I were discussing something and I made the statement, "you know before we had cellphones." The conversation stopped as if we had to search the deep recesses of our memories to remember the time before cell phones! Yes. There was such a time and it wasn't all that long ago. The information age has impacted our society as much as the industrial age did back in the 1800's. Life has changed and for better or worse we would be hit a hard blow were we to suddenly loose our ability to communicate.

Now, back to Tribe... There are other belly dance communities on the web - Buzz, Myspace, Frontpage, website, blogs, yahoo groups, etc, etc. For some reason everyone likes Tribe the best - I think it's how the "tribes" or groups are set up and accessed. The groups don't send you tons of e-mails that you don't want to read like yahoo groups does, yet you have easy access to all of the messages once you log in to the community. Myspace and Frontpage are individually neat - but they don't foster such a large group community. Then there is Buzz. Buzz is pretty good, but it's not as easy to access the community groups as Tribe is. Also, Buzz seems to be more cabaret oriented than Tribal.

In the end, if Tribe goes down the community will have to cope. Such is life - life is change and if you aren't changing ...well then you're dead!

Peace!