The Blogging Communities

What is blogging community?
Blogging means write something online in a blog that you want to share with the publics.Community referred to those people who shared the same area of interests. Thus, blogging communities are those people or bloggers who have the same interest in a particular area and they discuss together in a group or in this case, in a blog.


How to create a blogging community?

1. Choose a central gathering place (Bensen, 2009). According to Rowse (2009), comments section in the blog is a good and natural place to start to build the 'community'. Ask questions in the posts and try to interact with the readers.

2. Set up web analytics on the blog. For example, plug in google analytics (Bensen, 2009).

3. Start to find out who and where your potential readers are at (Bensen, 2009). Setting up Google Alerts on your blog will helps to determine who is your targeted readers.

4. Update your blog frequently and regularly to maintain you readers' interest. Use hyperlinks, forum, tag, links, chat space and comment post to allow the readers to be interactive with the blog they are reading. It also attract more readers to subscribe and link to your blog to maintain the readership.

5. Participate in specific social networking and get involved in it. Try to develop relationships with others and meet as many people as possible (Bensen, 2009).

Types of Blogging communities

According to Nancy White (2006), blogging communities show up in three main patterns:

• Single Blog/ Blogger Centric Community
• Central Connecting Topic Community
• Boundaried Community

(Source: Global Voices Community 2010)

Global Voices is one of the online communities. This online community falls into the Central Connecting Topic Community where it used technology to create an experience of a shared community. Global Voices Community aggregates blogs from developing nations in an effort to get the mainstream media to pay attention to the issues in those countries (White, 2006). Bloggers in Global Voices Community still have and maintain their own blogs. They group together in one community and supporting each other and basically learning from each other. 




References:

• Bensen, C. 2009, How to Build Community 101,viewed 17th April 2010, <http://conniebensen.com/blog/2009/03/14/how-to-build-community-101>
• Rowse, D 2009, 8 Tips for Building Community on Your Blog, viewed 18th April 2010, <http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/28/8-tips-for-building-community-on-your-blog>
• White, N 2006, 'Going Communal', Blogs and Community- launching a new paradigm for online community?, edn 11, viewed 18th April 2010, <http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-–-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community>