Helping communities with blogging
Sep 29, 2008
Blogs are mostly viewed as tools for:
- Self-expression
- Earning advertising revenue
- PR building and business promotion
There is a fourth aspect of blogging that often remains unexplored: community service through blogging. This was made evident during the recent spate of cyclones and tycoons in various cities including some cities in the USA, for instance Katrina. Hundreds of blogs disseminated highly relevant and useful information regarding various rescue operations going on at various places. Due to the nature of blogging – highly conversational and engaging – people can relate more to bloggers than anonymous officials or even newspaper websites (people don’t trust newspaper websites much anyway these days). A blog can be a great tool if you want to do community service. In this blog post we are going to focus on the logical aspect of blogging vis-à-vis communities.
Communities are groups of people openly coming together for a common reason. They might gather because they share something in common: school, town, family, experiences, knowledge, interest etc. Communities are formed around this shared interest that gains recognition over a period of time as a specific community. Blogs, on the other hand, are individual efforts at least in the initial stage. Here the author’s specific interests ebb and flow in due course and begin to gain recognition.
It is interesting to see how communities that are purpose and group-driven can be supported by blogs, which are solo-driven.
To talk about communities first, any community requires the following elements for its proper functioning:
- Place: A common place where new and old members have the license to come together.
- Leader: A leader is required to keep the community going and maintain the interest level of all the members.
- Purpose: Communities that do not have leaders should have strong purpose to keep it flowing, because the belief in the community per se will keep it going even if a leader steps out for reasons whatsoever.
- Participation: This is a must for the community to survive. This is achieved through members actively participating; some showing up at special events; some being lurkers (non-active) and so on. Participation of these kinds help form a community.
- Networking: All of the above will become futile if there is no means to connect to one-another. Communities after all tend to achieve some sort of connection across a shared interest.
Now moving on to blogs, the underlying aspects of blogging do provide a tinge of community within blogging thus revealing how the idea of a community can be achieved through blogs.
- Readers’ community: Blogs are written with the purpose of attracting the attention of like-minded people and expecting them to react on the material provided in the blog. To begin with, it is centered around the author or the blog but a community shows up when the author needs some help or assistance in the matter.
- Comments: Often blogs allow leaving comments on the authors’ written stuff, giving readers an open chance to participate in the conversation. However, such comments do not allow readers to interact with one another beyond the confines of the blog. To have threaded discussions on the blog in the form of a series of conversations, there are blog platforms available that are geared for such threaded discussions like the typical community forums.
- Outbound links: Bloggers provide other sources for the readers to visit, concerning their interest area. This allows to reach out to a greater group of people out there on the Internet.
- Inbound links: When bloggers send links from his/her blogs, many bloggers link back via trackback.
To summarize, communities are about shared interest and blogs are about individual interest. When different individual bloggers and different groups of like-minded people come together, communities are formed thus integrating blogging with communities in a seamless way!
Posted by Amrit Hallan | Tags: Blogging Impact
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