The Knowledge Tree, an online journal on learning innovation that has been around since 2002, has an interesting entry on how blogs help create community in their current issue. Nancy White, a consultant at Full Circle Associates in Seattle, has published an article — “Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?” — that paints a picture of blogs as a new tool for community with its own unique advantages. The article is a detailed summary of ideas posted on Nancy’s blog.
Blog communities take on three basic forms. A Blogger Centric community is the hub-and-spoke model where one popular blog has vast readership and feeds discussion on other satellite blogs. The defining identity is the central bloggers, although commenters also become known amongs themselves through backchannel communication. A Central Connecting Topic community where readership is largely invisible as the topic of conversation is what links blogs together. These blog rings may be explicitly organized or develop through an individual author’s interest in a particular topic. Power and identity are diffused, and the quality of the posts takes precedence. The third type is a Boundaried Community. This is a collections of blogs and readers hosted on a single site. There are other channels formally associated with the blogs, such as community forums, wikis and member directories. Identity here is tied to the social networking tools and measures that dictate status. Known bloggers are those with frequent posts, lots of comments and visually significant ties to other members. There are also hybrids of the three types, such as blog mentoring and live journaling.
By examining the unique and overlapping properties of each kind of community, some points of strategic importance surface. White also raises the question of whether these blog groups are more community or network. I find all of this extremely relevant to my own work in improving political dialogue, in large part because of the effort here to qualify the medium in terms of organizational structure and hint at that understanding leading to better leverage of blogs as a tool for purposeful community building.