Types of Blogging Communities and Methods to Build Blogging Communities

Source by Personal Branding Network

Ever wonder why bloggers like Kenny Sia, Xia Xue and Dawn Yang became so famous through blogging.? Whereas others have to work extremely hard just to be in their position of recognition.  There is no doubt that, blogging communities play a big role in this matter.

Source by ShoutEm

Blogging communities are commonly acknowledged as a social network that strengthens the communication and connections among various groups of people sharing a similar interest. (Kinkekdei, 2007).It’s easy to form a blogging community. What it needed to be done is an administrator needs to register or establish a new blog community and sign in other members and feed their weblogs through an RSS-Feed.

Nancy White (2006) describes the blogging communities into three types. This consists of The Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community, the Central Connecting Topic Community and the Boundaries Community. 

1)   The Single Blog/ Blogger Centric Communities

This blog based community is known as the very first form of blogging community where a blog is only own by one owner or organization. Through this blog-based community, readers are allowed to comment and meeting others commenters that comments on the blogger’s site.  According to David (2006), he mentioned that blogs personally defined space.  The blog owner has the central control over this community. (Nancy. 2006).  Once the blog owner decides to take down the blog, the community would most probably traumatize. However, the good side of this community is that the blog owner get to know his or hers commenters and in the same time commenters themselves hget to know each other as well.  It is a good way to bring people around the world together. Example like Dawn Yang, is a Singaporean famous celebrity blogger that blogs about her daily personal life.

2)   The Central Connecting Topic Community

This blog-based community is a network formation. (Nancy, 2006).  These forms of community are linked together based on the common passion andtopic. Blogs like food blogs, travel blogs, political blogs are usually blogs that attracts a large number of  readers to read their blog.  Besides that, in topic centric communities, both power and identity is distributed across the community. The appearances of the community do not rise or fall on one blog. ( David, 2006). Hyperlinks in the form of blogroll, link to other blogs within a blog posts, tagging, RSS-Feed are what links them among each other. Researchers kike Anjewjerden (2005), Vande Moere 2006) have been using tools to analyze post contents and interlinking structures because many bloggers don’t realize how their blogs fit into a larger network. (Nancy, 2006). Example like Global Voices is a blog community that aggregates the blogs from developing countries in an effort to get the mainstream media to pay attention to issues in their country.

3)   The Boundaries Community

Nancy (2006) mentioned that these blog-based communities are collections of blogs and blog readers that hosted a single site or a platform. Members that were given a chance to create a new blog are often members that register and join the community. For instance, MySpace.com, Yahoo 360, and Share Your Stories are examples of the Boundaries Blog. Communities like this commonly use blogs as parts of their ecosystem. Bloggers can easily access to other blogs therefore they do not necessarily need RSS-Feed and cross linking in this community. Moreover, these communities also uses tools as discussion board, social networking and instant message to build in. (Nancy, ibid). For example Share Your Story, is a site that was starting out as a discussion boar based community for parent with babies then later changed into a blogging community. Parent can share their own personal stories about their babies and also get to know other community as well.

The picture above shows a personal website of a Fashion blogger , Rumi Neely. Her blog falls under the Single Blogger/ Blogger Centric Community. This is because her blogs is a good exemplified of well-known or ' A List Blogger . Moreover, her communities also grow and develop over time. The volume of the comment on the blog post is beyond overwhelming.

References List

1. Kinkeldei. B, 2007, Whitepaper Blog Communities, Forging Connections and Promoting Growth Through Blog Communities, viewed on 16^th August 2011, <http://www.21publish.com/pub/21publish/blogging-whitepaper.pdf>

2. White. N, 2006, Blogs and Community- launching a new paradigm for online community, viewed on 16^th August 2011,  < http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community>

3. David.W, 2006, Move Beyond Blogging – Start Buzzing, viewed on 17^th August 2011,< http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/networking/index.html>