Three Types of Blogging Communities

Blogging Community is described as "blog communities aggregate the individual and independent blogs of a number of people with a shared interest, the same cause, similar political views, business interest, etc" (Kinkeldei, 2007). Bloggers create a community by having the idea of a social network where they reinforce their communication among different group of people. They do so, by reading each other blog, commenting and some chat with each other too.

According to White (2006), there are 3 main types of blog which are Single Blog / Blogger Centric Community, Central Connecting Topic Community and the Boundaried Community.

                                    Figure 1: Single Blog / Blogger Centric Community  (Source: White)

The Single Blog/ Blogger Centric Community is based on the community to appear as readers comments and getting to know the blogger. It has only one owner of the blog but it has many commentors in the blog. The building method for this community is by the increasing number of commentators. Key commentors on the blogs will attract readers to read and comment as well. Meanwhile, the commentors do gain by attracting the readers to read in their own blog too.

                                    Figure 2: Central Connection Top Centric Community  (Source: White)

Central Connecting Top Centric Community is a network of blogs that is connected by having the same topic or interest. The community builds through bloggers having mutual interest and gaining through the relevance and amount of enjoyment a post provides to others.

                                Figure 3: Boundaried Communities (Source: White)

Boundaried Communities has many blogs coming into one platform where they have forums and instant mesaging tools. This is where everyone can discuss at the same time which features a networking stand.

Paul Tan http://paultan.org/ is a blogger who blogs about cars. His blog would be categorized under the central connecting top community because his blogs contains a relevance to an audience where they share their common interest about cars. He allows his readers to leave comments and educate them more about car reviews and what not.

Reference

Kinkeldei, B 2007, 'Forging Connections and Promoting Growth Through Blog Communities', 21 Publish Cooperative Publishing, journal viewed 17 March 2012, journal retrieved from < http://www.21publish.com/pub/21publish/blogging-whitepaper.pdf>.

White, N 2006, 'Blogs and Community - Launching  a new paradigm for online community?', The knowledge tree, website viewed 17 March 2012, webiste retrieved form < http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community>.

Classification of Blogs

Bloggers have different interest in writing blogs and this creates the different readers and types of blogs. However, the classification of blogs is more detailed compared to the types of blogs. Types may include political blogs or personal blogs but classification on the other hand has its own nature too. According to media analyst, Margaret Simons (Funnell, 2012), blogs can be classified to Pamphleteering blog, Digest blog, Advocate blog, Mechanics, Exhibition blog, Gate watcher, Personal blog, Advertisement and lastly new blog.

On the other hand, Desai and Shah (Machine Learning, n.d), classify blogs into age and gender of the author by 4 techniques which are Support Vector Machines, Logistic Regression, PCA and Euclidean Distance (instance based method) and K Means.

The classification of blogs from Simons is better compared to Desai and Shah because Simons classification is more precise by classifying to the type of readers search and the topic of what the readers are searching. Desai and Shah's method lean more towards statistics and numbers which classify blogs through age and gender which feature the bag of words, stemming, spell correction and  calculating occurrence of words in the blog. Simons way is more specific and easy to acknowledge where she narrowed down the subject matter of the blog for classifying purpose.

References:

Desai & Shah, n.d, 'Machine Learning: Classification of Blogs Team: mENIACs', journal viewed 17 March 2012, journal retrieved from <http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~priyank/projects/Classification_of_Blogs.pdf>.

Funnel, A 2012, ' A Taxonomy of Blogs' website viewed 17 March 2012, website retrieved from <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/mediareport-1999/a-taxonomy-of-blogs/3186686>.

Blogosphere Phenomenon and Benefit

Through this 21st virtually connected century, the use of blogging has multiply liked an epidemic virus throughout the world.  The blogosphere is a community where all the blogs can be found and read. According to Technorati (2011), bloggers today are specifically having different needs whereby some derive their income from blogging or most do it to express their thoughts. Thus, they are classified into entrepreneurs, corporate, professional-full times and part-timers and hobbyists.  

As stated by Naughton (n.d) "Technorati, blog-tracking service was claiming to be monitoring 56.9 million blogs and new blogs were being created at a rate approaching two per second". The community was always thoughtful and well informed and there were no entry for them to share their thoughts until the blogging software and the internet came in hand which gave them the platform they needed (Naughton, n.d).

Having a blog does not only allow one to express how he or she feels but it can benefit others such as being news feeder. This is because blogs are very influential such as the social networking sites today. An example stated by Naughton (n.d) "if one of your products has flaws, or if a service you provide is sub-standard, then the chances are that the news will appear somewhere on a blog".  This valids the power of blogs and how it can benefit the user or the community.

The statistics of the famous types of blogs in Malaysia are; politics (16%), writing personal topic s (28%) and technology (16%) (Gaman, 2007). All these types of blog provide readers to obtain information from time to time. Other kind of community such as political blogs is highly increasing every day. According to Bower and Stoller (2005), "research conducted by MyDD.com, as of July 2005, the ninety-eight most trafficked progressive blogs totaled an amazing 15,181,649 page views per week, an average of over two million daily page views. This is because of blog's interactive nature that helps facilitate the individual to lower their inhibitions to speak about sensitive issue and also ideas can spread across blogosphere without worrying about the factors that limit community meetings (Lewis, 2007).

Bower, C & Stoller, M 2005, 'Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics', New Politics Institute, viewed 19 March 2012, <http://ndn-newpol.civicactions.net/sites/ndn-newpol.civicactions.net/files/The-Emergence-of-the-Progressive-Blogosphere.pdf>.

Gaman, 2007, 50 Most Influential Blogs in Malaysia, Sabahan.com-Making a Living off the Internet from the Rainforest of Borneo, viewed 19 March 2012, <http://www.sabahan.com/2007/02/06/50-most-influential-blogs-in-malaysia/>.

Lewis, G. 2007, 'Blogging Democracy: The Contribution of  political Blogs to Dem

ocracy', Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Canada, viewed 19 March 2012, <http://www.christopher-parsons.com/blog/thoughts/blogging-democracy-the-contribution-of-political-blogs-to-democracy-by-gareth-lewis/>.

Naughton, J n.d Blogging and the Emerging Media Ecosystem, viewed 19 March 2012, <http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf>.

Technorati 2011, State Of The Blogosphere 2011, viewed 19 March 2012, <http://technorati.com/blogging/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-2011-introduction/>.

Purpose of My Blog

The main purpose of me creating this blog is particularly because I feel there is a need for me to express my point of view on issues in publication and design. Theories and opinions about weblog also would be my interest in not only sharing but learning from others as well.

My main target audience would most probably be my peers which includes, classmates and friends.