Types of blogging communities & methods to build blogging communities.

As define by (Kinkeldei 2006) ‘blog communities aggregate the individual and independent blogs of a number of people with a shared interest’. Interests like fashion to food to politics and even to celebrities. In order to create a community, a blogger needs to abide a few guidelines like to respond to the communities’ comments, ask a question or two after a post, have some competition or projects where readers can participate and the most important one would be linking one another. ‘Community can be seen as one of the major attributes of the Internet, and it really does form friendships and a sense of companionship’ (Woods 2011).  

There are a total of three blogging communities, which is “the Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community, the Central Connecting Topic Community and the Boundaried Community” (White 2006). The Single Blog is a blog owned by one blogger or an organization where readers becomes commentors and starts to share their identity with one another as time goes by. Commentors do have the choice of providing a feedback or not but they do not have a choice when a blog runs down or changes anything. The commentors do not have a sense of control over the blog.

‘The Central Connecting Topic Centric blog community is a network formation’ (White 2006). Like what (White 2006) explained 'What links them is hyperlinks, in the form of blogrolls, links to other blogs within blog posts, tagging, aggregated feeds (using RSS), trackbacks and comments'. Blogs that falls under the same category would connect with one blog to another with a code.

Lastly, ‘Boundaried communities are collections of blogs and blog readers hosted on a single site or platform’(White 2006). The site could be a forum where the communities can register and join. The forum is usually controlled by the community where they can voice out, control posts, have discussions and more.

Screen capture of (UNISA blog)

To further discuss this, an example of Boundaried communities would be the blog like UNISA blog. Our own University blog, every student who studies under UNISA will be given an ID to log in. As seen in the picture above, the UNISA blog is a forum where one can have discussions, enquiry, messages and more posted on it. The forum also provide links to other student’s blog, where students can read and provide feedbacks.

References:


1) Kinkeldei, B. 2006, Whitepaper Blog Communities, viewed on 22 August 2011, <http://www.21publish.com/pub/21publish/blogging-whitepaper.pdf>.

2) UNISA nd, learnonline, viewed on 22 August 2011, <https://learn.unisa.edu.au/login/index.php>.

3) White, N.  2006, Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?, viewed on 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>.


4) Woods, R. 2011, Why Are Online Communities Important?, viewed on 22 August 2011, <http://film315s.com/why-are-online-communities-important/>.