Blogging Community

What is a Blogging Community?

Bock stated that ‘communities are characterized by three things: common interest, frequent interaction and identification,’ and these three things must all appear on online space to form an online community (White, 2005). Thus, blogging community is a group of people who have similar area of interest and they connect and interact with each other via blogs.

Types of Blogging Community 

Nancy White (2006) has identified three types of blogging communities including the single blog/blogger centric community, the central connecting topic community and the boundaried community.

source: The Knowledge Tree

The Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community

The blog is owned by one person or an organization but might consists of one or more blogger. Blogger has the power to set their own rules and remove comment as he is the central blogger (White, 2006). In this community, the commentors are not able to control the blog’s topic and bloggers are not able to control the discussion flow by commentors (White, 2006).

source: The Knowledge Tree

The Central Connecting Topic Community

In this community, blogs that share similar interests or topic are linked together and create a combination of domain within the community (White, 2006). For example, food blogs and fashion blogs. Different technologies are supporting the structure of this community as bloggers use tags, hyperlinks and blogrolls to link with each other (White, 2006).

source: The Knowledge Tree

The Boundaried Community

It is a collection of blogs and readers are hosted on a particular blog (White, 2006). The power lies on the platform owner and the members are required to register in order to create a blog (White, 2006). This kind of community has some additional tools such as discussion board, wikis, social networking features and instant messaging which enable members to communicate with each other (White, 2006).

source: The Knowledge Tree

Global Voices

source: Global Voices

Global Voices is considered as the central connecting topic community because it use technologies incorporate hyperlinks, aggregated feeds, tagging and other to connect one blogs to another (White, 2006). Global Voices is a community blog that bloggers emphasis on voices that are not usually heard in mainstream media. More than 300 bloggers and translators are grouped together to support each other and share some particular issues.

References:

• White, N 2005, How some folks have tried to describe community, Full Circle Associates, viewed 22 August 2011, <http://www.fullcirc.com/community/definingcommunity.htm>
• White, N 2006, Blogs and community- launching a new paradigm for online community?, The Knowledge Tree, viewed 22 August 2011, <http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community>