blogging community

I’ve been meaning to read/listen to this for ages since I saw David mention the article in his blog.

Nancy White is looking at the development of on-line communities and how they are developing with the advent of blogging (taking things on from email lists and forums).  She argues that there are three types of community; ones built around a single blogger (or site), topic based and boundaried.

About one blog centric communities she says:

The power in this community is firmly in the central blogger’s control. If he/she were to take down his/her blog, the community would most likely shatter unless the members had formed alternate communication paths to each other.

I think this is pretty much what happened when the excellent Inspector Sands stopped blogging at Casino Avenue.  There isn’t (as far as I’ve seen) another blog doing the things he did and so the community there didn’t have anywhere to decamp to.

Nancy also points out:

From a subject matter perspective, single blog centric communities are almost broadcast-like, with the central blogger setting the conversational topic. Commentors can respond, or go away, but unless they develop an influential relationship with the central blogger, they can’t control the topic.

Which is why I’ll keep on showing you photos of the food I cook.

In the topic centric community Nancy argues that we’re dealing with a more defuse power relationship:

In topic centric communities both power and identity is distributed across the community. The existence of the community does not rise or fall on one blog. It can scale out and form subcommunities easily. Identity is manifest through the relevance, quality or amount of enjoyment a post provides to others. Personal details are not always disclosed on the blogs, but may be shared via private email and instant messaging. The rich network of perspectives allows the readers many views on an issue, rather than one that you might see in a blog centric community.

In my case I’m fortunate to have the brilliant Bloggers4Laboursite that Andrew has built and which seems to me to do so much to create the Labour blogging community.  But even if the site were taken down tomorrow we’d be able to recreate it or something like it, and the connections between us could be recreated.

She says blogs in boundaried communities are:

part of the overall ecosystem. There is less emphasis on RSS and cross linking because those features are built into the technology in other ways. Because they are within a defined boundary, bloggers can see and easily access other blogs. They can, if they wish, link but mostly within this closed system and they seem to link less often outside of the community. This leads to denser and faster possible internal connections, possibly community building.

I wonder whether Labour Home is a bit like that; there seem to be plenty of outside links but perhaps fewer to “the conversation” than I would have anticipated? 

Nancy also looks at the roles individuals play in developing and helping these communities to exist which is well worth a look and some thought.

She concludes by saying:

Community is alive and well in the blogosphere. It is emerging in a variety of patterns and manifesting in all sizes and types of communities. By beginning to explore their shape and interaction patterns, we can begin to think about how to intentionally nurture blog based communities for specific purposes. Much like the lessons for forum based communities which emerged in the late 1990s, we are now discovering what works, why, and what might happen next. It is still new. The patterns are not stable. But they suggest ways to think about the role of technology, power, identity and content in designing online communities.

In writing about this I’m also aware of Will’s article and post arguing that community is no longer a useful term (having lost its value as a result of politicians adopting it).  Will says:

people who actually live in communities don’t need the ‘c’ word; people who don’t have it thrown at them as a consolation.

But perhaps those of us who spend as much time as I do on-line need all the consolation we can get.