Firstly what is a blogging community? According to Rich (1999) blogging community are a group of bloggers who interact online and a frequent contributor to discussions & ideas. What's more, they foster community and conversation by allowing readers to comment on postings, thus becoming an author in turn, or by providing an e-mail address to dialog directly with the blogger. (Gill, 2004) Frankly this will allow the audience to be comfortable on interacting with the blog and enhanced their interpersonal communication within the blogging community. Similar to my previous entry on classification of blogs, blogging community comes in varieties of topics. However the differences are that user have to be registered and participate within their own desire to the destined community. Personally blogging community help increase the number of viewers as majority of the user shares similar interest.
White (2006) stated that there're three types of community blogs. The Followings are the three examples :-
1) Single blogger centric communities
Single blogger centric communities is where a single blog owner has full control of their own blog platform. According to White (2006) The blog owner can set the rules and norms of engagement. There is no expectation of democracy, although when bloggers close or remove comments, cries of 'censorship' still ring out. But there is no obligation on the blogger to either provide the option for comments, nor to allow all comments.
2) Topic centric communities
Topic centric communities focuses on one particular topic and interest.In comparison to single blogger communities, it has no single technological platform, with each blogger selecting their own tool. What links them is hyperlinks, in the form of blogrolls, links to other blogs within blog posts, tagging, aggregated feeds (using RSS), trackbacks and comments. (White, 2006). Notable example of topic centric communities blog is Lee & Satchi levers's the world is not flat blog that centers in the travel blog community.
3) Boundaried communities
Boundaried communities are compilation of blogs and blog readers that linked to a single site. In short members register and 'join' the community and are offered the chance to create a blog. This boundary makes them the closest form to traditional forum based communities. (White 2006). Social networking site especially like Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster and others are prominence examples of boundaried blogging communities.
An example of the structure of a blogging community
In the Malaysian blogging community, Che Det is a blog owned by former Malaysian prime minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. Based on the shown examples above, this blog falls under the category of single blogger centric communities. Generally the purpose of the blog is where he share his opinion and thoughts on wide range of issues and news that is happening around Malaysia. Only those that are registered to his blog are eligible to leave comments in regards of his entry.
References
1) Rich, C. 1999, Creating online media: a guide to research, writing and design on the Internet, McGraw Hill, Australia
2) Gill, K.E., 2004, "how can we measure the influence of the blogosphere" journal of communication, retrieved 12th of April 2010, from faculty.washington.edu/kegill/pub/www2004_keg_ppt.pd
3) White, N. 2006, "Blogs and community: Launching a new paradigm for online community?", Going Communal, online, retrieved April 12th, 2010
http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community
No comments:
Post a Comment