Blogging Community/Community Blog - Basic Definitions

   

Today was the last day of month-long and very intense workshop on online community and facilitation skills from Nancy White at Full Circle.  I'm sad because it was a fantastic experience due to Nancy's incredible skill and energy as an online facilitator and my fellow workshop participants on who logged in from around the world.   One of my learning goals was to go deeper into the question around blogging communities and the question, "Can blogging communities be facilitated?"    This question is one that I hope to continue thinking aloud about ...

Nancy shared an excellent post  from Steve Shu that provides a simple and clear definition of community blogs and blogs communities.  I like collecting these so I have them on-hand to explain to nonprofits I work with --

Community blogs are predominantly websites where many authors can post journal entries on a single space and where people can respond by commenting on posts to the community blog. 

Blogging communities are collections of individual blogs (potentially tens, hundreds, or thousands) tied together by a larger common value or theme. Conversations can occur on the individual blogs, between the blogs, on a common messageboard that binds the invidudal blogs together in a community, or across other blogs in the blogosphere.

So, let's look for some nonprofit examples.  Global s is an example of a community blog. Netsquared, a new project from Compumentor, is an example of a blogging community.

And, while poking around Steve's blog, I noticed that he writes about nonprofits - gotta add him to my reader ...

Comments

[Steve Shu]

Beth,

Thanks for the compliment and the link. Sounds like Nancy conducted an interesting workshop. I didn't see the exact post on Nancy's blog that you were referring to ...

FWIW - I do think that blogging communities can be facilitated. Sometimes it works best when the facilitator is an actual participant in the community (as opposed to an outsider).

I think that there are also some navigation items that can help to build community too. For example, at the blog community 21Publish set up for BusinessWeek, there is navigation boxes for things like "Big Debates" (i.e., areas where there tends to be more commenting activity).

http://www.mbablogs.businessweek.com

[Beth]

Thanks for your comments.

Do you think there are other principles of design or good practice for facilitating blog communities? Is there a list or article on this topic? Maybe you've written about this on your blog ?

[Nancy White]

Steve, I had not posted it on my blog... it was posted on the workshop website (not public). Just FYI. I think I had already confused my workshop participants enough so I did not hop platforms. :-)

[Beth]

Nancy,

You don't confuse people - you enlighten them and inspire them!

[Steve Shu]

Nancy and Beth,

Thanks for clearing things up. Sounds like it was a neat workshop!