Seth, like Digg, I see both Guy’s and Seth Godin’s recent projects starting off with a built in audience.

However, there are other communities such as Piczo (and yes facebook) that’s growing by building a community.

It can’t be easy by definition – if the audience is one place, it can’t be in another place (to a good approximation). Add in network effect (people being where others are), and the outcome is a very few big winner-take-all results. But hey, maybe the venture capitalists get pleasure from the act of spending money itself, maybe they’re doing it for the joy and happiness of being in business (to be clear, this is riffing off what Z-listers get told when they point out how the blog game is rigged).

I don’t see community as being at the heart of the JPG coup, but certainly the Digg debacle and Newsvine’s lackluster participation level has community at the heart of it.

I’ve participated in both of these communities. Digg’s community is so far out of control that I doubt it can be reined in at this point. Community is usually a mirror of its leadership and Digg is no exception. Kevin Rose has made a point out of capitalizing on his “power to the people and pirates” hacker image, and the Digg community mirrors that.

Newsvine, on the other hand, had more of a problem with how the site itself worked than the community as a whole. When Newsvine first launched, it seemed to want submissions of MSM stories and was aiming at aggregating them. Submissions of user-generated content never seemed to climb beyond that user’s page, and the site itself was very difficult to navigate.

Since part of my “real life” job involves online communities, I tend to try everything and see what sticks. In Digg’s case, the fundamental concept is great, but the community is large and unruly. In Newsvine’s case, there is some great potential for community-building but they need people to do it.

Communities don’t grow themselves — they need people committed to them to grow. This is what Heather Champ does so well at Flickr, and what she was trying to foster at JPG.

I got in the beta today, and I like what they’re doing over there. Something different than other social sites.