Online community is formed when people with same interest comes together and exchange ideas and resources through the Internet (Mandel, C 2008). Blogging has recently become a new platform for online community, which has always played a crucial part of the Internet that are mainly formed by email lists, bulletin boards and forums (White, 2006). Therefore, blogging community can be defined as an online community where bloggers and readers share the same interest in certain topics and issues, and they are eager to discuss and share about their views and opinion with each other, using blogs as their platform.
Currently, we have three kinds of identified blogging communities, which intercepts each other and form a hybrid in between (White, 2006), namely:
Currently, we have three kinds of identified blogging communities, which intercepts each other and form a hybrid in between (White, 2006), namely:
(Source: The Knowlege Tree, 2006)- Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community is formed with a central identity, the blog owner, who controls the focus and power in the community firmly.
- Those in the Central Connecting Topic Community are those who have passion and are very into a certain topic, less interested in positioning themselves and the bloggers and readers with the same interest will link each other.
- As for the Boundaried Community, it is formed a collection of blogs and blog readers hosted on a single platform such as forums.
The central identities of the Single Blogger Centric Community are usually those who have high reputation, or celebrities, or ordinary people but they wrote things that attract a large amount of readers. For example, Xia Xue, a famous Singaporean blogger, is the central identity of her own blog. She blogs about herself, her lifestyles and things happening around her. She has her own group of readers, and that builds up the Single Blogger Centric Community, because her readers build up the population of her blog. The readers will leave comments and also discuss with each other, subscribe and link to her blog, follow her on Twitter and the readers will also get to know each other when they are having discussion. Therefore, Xia Xue needs to constantly update her blog and interacts with her readers to maintain the community.
References:
- Mandel, C 2008, Form your own online community, Microsoft Home Magazine, viewed 12 April 2010, http://www.microsoft.com/canada/home/communications-and-mobility/articles/form-your-own-online-community.aspx
- White, N 2006, Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?, The Knowledge Tree, viewed 12 April 2010, http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community
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