2c. Explain briefly types of blogging communities&methods to build blogging communities. Then discuss the structure of one blogging community in brief

• Define what is a blogging community.

Generally a community refers to a group of people connected together sharing interests in the cyberspace. Derived from the meaning of 'online community', blogging community can mean a group of people who join together and interact with each other online throught the set of technology, in this case Blogs (White, 2006).

• How do you create a blogging community?

To create a blogging community, one's blog must have a certain element to fit into a certain blogging community. For example, a food blog belongs to a topic centric community because the blogger discusses about a particular subject identification, that is food (White, 2006). A blogging community is created when the bloggers felt the sense of belonging and identity and are interested to find out deeper into the subject (Anthony, 2009). By commenting on people's blog, we are also creating a blogging community. Interactivity between bloggers can increase the attachment in the blogging society (Daily Blog Tips, 2007). In addition, RRS is also a vital tool for bloggers to discover each other to create a blogging community (White, 2006).

• Explain briefly the types blogging communities. Then, discuss the structure of ONE blogging community that you know of, eg. Global Voices/Jeff Ooi.com.

According to White, there are several types of blogging communities, including blog based community, single blog centric community, central connecting topic community and etc (White, 2006). The blogging community that I am going to discuss about is the UniSA blog - taking from the closest example we have. The UniSA blog is the boundaried community. It is somehow close to forum based community and it contains discussion boards as well as intant messaging system built in (Whilte, 2006. Bloggers in this community can easily access to the other blogger's blog internally (White, 2006).

The above image shows all the 'participants' from a particular course in the blogging community of UniSA. Users can easily access any of the participant's blog.





This image shows the elements that define it as the Boundaried Communities.

(301 words)

References

Anthony, 2009, What is a blogging community, The Travel Tart, viewed 30 September 2010, http://www.thetraveltart.com/what-is-a-blogging-community/.

Daily Blog Tips, 2007, Building a community around your blog, Dailyblogtips.com, viewed 30 September 2010, http://www.dailyblogtips.com/building-a-community-around-your-blog/

White, N 2006, Blogs and community - launching a new paradigm for online community?, The Knowledge Tree, viewed 30 September 2010, http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community.