Still very much in the thick of discussion in regards to the blogosphere, this post will briefly explain blogging communities and how they are formed.
A blogging community acts very much like community in the general sense, in that it consists of “groups of people...” – in this case bloggers – “...who, for a specific subject, share a specialty, role, passion, interest, concern, or a set of problems” (Garfield, 2010).
The formation of blogging communities came about with the proliferation of blogging, as more and more people started to blog, and as they did so, more and more topics were being talked about. This then lead to every involved blogger finding another by way of “commenting on each others’ blogs”, as well as having RSS and feedreaders offering “new possibilities” of how blogs were discovered and read (White, 2006).
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White (2006) further explains the nature of blogging communities, dividing them into three categories:
Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community:
A community based on one blog (managed by one or several authors), where the readers and commentors of the blog are the community members.
Central Connecting Topic Community:
A community that arises between blogs linked by a common passion or topic.
Boundaried Communities:
A collection of blogs and blog readers hosted on a single site or platform.
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One example of a blogging community would be Bloggers, a website that is home to “Millions of Bloggers”.
Bloggers' most popular blogs under the 'Arts & Culture' category.
Bloggers' most popular blogs under the 'News & Media' category.
A variety of blogs are aggregated on this site, with the main directory placing such blogs under different categories (arts and culture, business, entertainment, life and lifestyle, news and media, etc.).
As one author puts it, being involved in blogging communities gives you “strength in numbers”, among reaping other benefits (Banks, 2010).
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References:
Bloggers.com, 2011, website homepage, viewed 24 April 2011, <http://bloggers.com>.
Banks, J.B. 2010, ‘4 benefits to joining blogging communities’, BloggingPro.com, viewed 24 April 2011, <http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2010/06/07/4-benefits-to-joining-blogging-communities/>.
Kinkeldei, B. 2007, ‘Blog communities: Forging connections and promoting growth through blog communities’, whitepaper by 21Publish, viewed 23 April 2011, <http://www.21publish.com/pub/21publish/blogging-whitepaper.pd>.
White, N. 2006, ‘Blogs and community – launching a new paradigm for online community?’, The Knowledge Tree, edition 11, September 2006, viewed 24 April 2011, <http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-–-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community>.
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