Blogging Community – What is it? And how do we create it?

According to Chin and Chignell (2006), a blog is normally written by a single author and functions as mixture of document and links hypertext networks with social networks, creating a community where people discusses within the ‘blog’. Question is how is it that bloggers create a community to their writing? It is quite simply actually. A blogging community is created not to advertise and it does not need to be a famous public blog network but merely a society of bloggers that comes online together to help each other (Yoskovitz 2007). According to Yoskovitz (2007), these are the steps to creating a blogging community:

1. Get a Few Initial Members Involved.

2. Setup Forums.

3. Setup an Email Distribution List or Yahoo Group

4. Create a Website/Blog.

5. Focus on Group Blog Promotion.

6. Actively Recruit New Members.

This is an example of how blogging community can be created, not the only way. For deeper elaboration of each step, do view Yoskovitz’s explanation. Also, blogging community can be created via links and comments. Bauer (2006) stated that she links her blog to others as it is an essence of the spirit of generosity which is required to have a lively blogging community. Also, she added that by commenting, this allows people to share their piece of mind where you will know that readers are not only concerned with your discussion but also respond.

According to White (2006), there are 3 types of blogging community; one blog centric community, topic centric community and boundaried community (explanation for each type of community can be found here. An example of a one blog centric community would be kennysia.com where the author himself has the right and authority to allow or take off any comments by the community. From this blog, Kenny’s fans read his post and starts commenting on what he has started to discusse in the first place. However, as stated by Koterwas (2007), should the blogger close down this blog, the community would most probably perish.

References:

Bauer, E 2006, How to Build Blog Traffic – Community, Blogher, viewed 12 April 2010, http://www.blogher.com/node/8128

Chin, A, Chignell, M 2006, A Social Hypertext Model for Finding Community in Blogs, HT’06, ACM, Odense, Denmark.

Koterwas, T 2007, Blogs and Community – Parts 1 -5, wdil.org, viewed 12 April 2010, http://www.wdil.org/resources/blogs-and-community-parts-1-5

Yoskovitz, B 2007, Create Your Own Blog Network, Instigator Blog, viewed 12 April 2010, http://www.instigatorblog.com/create-your-own-blog-network/2007/01/17/