White (2004) defines a blogging community where people individually and collectively come together to express themselves. When people care about who said what and not just the what alone, this relationship forms a dynamic and links are no longer the only means of communicating a message across. Carpenter (2004) explains that people join communities for different reasons, have different interests and participate in different ways. There is no guaranteed formula for the success of a community and no single model that has been shown to work every time.
Source: www.gamexeon.com/forum/
To create a blogging community, it is very important to organize yourself interms of the content that will be added, the layout, style, and tools that will attract the audience. List your blog permalink in directories. According to Wordpres (2008) permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink. There are many blog directories on the Internet to chose from. A simple Google search for "blog directories" will bring thousands of results, hence marketing your blog.
One way to create a community is to have a signature link to your blog on message boards and forums. According to Perez (2008) The most natural place to start to create ‘community’ on a blog is within its comments section. This is a good place because in our day and age it is a place that most web users are ‘wired’ to look for interactivity in. Most bloggers have them – they’re on by default when they set their blog up and they never switch them off. They see the comments as adding a lot to the blog – making it a place of shared learning, interactivity and dynamic conversation. Other bloggers decide not to have them. Their reasons vary from not having time to moderate them to being frustrated by comment spam.
Martin (2007) thinks that tags have a lot of potential. To a certain extent, they could be used to replace searching, if done well. The tag cloud is easy to scan. A list of tags will be clearly recognised as such if it is in a cloud. The cloud works because it fits a lot of information into a small space, and is easy to scan over. The tagging system is useless when the tags you use vary.
According to White (2004), there are 3 kinds of blogging communities. The first kind of blog is the Blogger Centric Community where the one is blog is owned by one owner or organization with readers and commentators making the community. The second kind is the topic centric community where the central focus is on the topic of concern and power and identity of bloggers is distributed across the community. Last is the boundaried community which a collection of blogs and blogs readers are hosted on a single site.
An example of Blogger Centric community can be Blogger.com itself. There is a blog owner of a group of people owning every blog with whom the power rests, , they may emerge overtime, share personal details via private email, instant messaging “widgets” that are given on the website Comments can be allowed and not allowed but the latter would allow no visible manifestion of the blod. Blogs on blogger are almost broadcast-like where people talk about their topics of interest, their day, their lives and commentators can only comment and critique on that but not control it.
References:
Carpenter,T 2004, Designing for an online community: a guide, Australian Flexible Learning Network, viewed
http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/guides/onlinelearningcommunity.pdf
Martin, M 2007, Using Categories and Tags Effectively on Your Blog, Problogger, viewed
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/09/27/using-categories-and-tags-effectively-on-your-blog/
Perez, S 2008, Blog Comments Still Matter, viewed
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blog_comments_still_matter.php
White,N 2004, Blogs and community- launching a new paradigm for online community? Full circle associates, viewed
http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/2006/12/blogs-and-community-launching-new.htm
Wordpress (2008), Codex, Wordpress. Org, viewed
No comments:
Post a Comment