"B" for Blog and Blogging II

B Types
One quick click on the Internet search engine and you can get many different types of blog. According to Simons (2008), there are 8 types of blogs which are 'Pamphleteering Blogs, The Digest Blog, The Advocacy Blog, The Popular Mechanics Blog, The Exhibition Blog, The Gatewatcher Blog, The Diary, The Advertisement, and The News Blog'.
For explanation, you can visit THE WEB: Towards a taxonomy of blogs

While Wikipedia (2008) said there are personal blogs, corporate blogs and question blogging. Wikipedia (2008) also divides blogs according to the media type:
Vlog
Linklog
Sketchblog

Photoblog
Tumblelogs
Phlog

Blog is also segregated by genre (Wikipedia 2008) such as:
Political blogs
Travel blogs
Fashion blogs
Project blogs
Education blogs
Niche blogs
Dreamlogs
Splog

Technorati (2008) divides blogs into 6 major categories. Many blogs are hard to be identified because they are blurred due to the combinations of styles. As Wikipedia (2008) stated, blogs can be differed by the type of content as well as 'the ways the content is... written'. So, how do you classify the blogs? The best is to depend on the bloggers and readers. It depends on how the bloggers convey present their message. Readers are also important as different people have different way in interpreting a message depending on their schemata (Putnis and Petelin 1996).

B Communities
As blogs are grouping according to the types, they formed blogging communities. Community is defined as ‘solidarity institution, primary interaction and institutional distinct group’ (Effrat 1974). The way to form blogging communities is the same as the way to form virtual communities. Benschop (1997) said

‘people form virtual community as a reaction to the disintegration of the traditional local communities… Secondly, virtual communities arise more or less spontaneously when enough people meet each other on a more or less regular basis in the 'third places' of cyberspace… Thirdly, the members… meet online to do just about everything that other people do in their local social world’.

(Source: Mahidol University)

Bloggers form communities by having common interest and they share ideas and comments with each others. Licklider and Taylor also said that online communities ‘will be communities not of common location but of common interest’ (Hauben).

White (2006) said that there are three blogging community structures:
1. Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community

‘... emerges as readers begin returning to early bloggers' sites, commenting and getting to know not only the blogger, but the community of commentors. The one blog is owned by one owner or organisation.’

2. Central Connecting Topic Community is ‘community that arises between blogs linked by a common passion or topic’.

3. Boundaried Communities

‘... are collections of blogs and blog readers hosted on a single site or platform. Typically 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’.

‘MyBlogLog is a social network for the blogger community… whereby bloggers sign up for free accounts… and can initiate a blog community for one or more blogs author’ (Wikipedia 2008). MyBlogLog communities that are ‘particularly popular [will] have the most members’ (Wikipedia 2008). Under MyBlogLog community page, members can find communities based on the most popular topics which is a central connecting topic community.

It is simple to create a blogging community. The main thing is to have a platform such as eblogger, MyBlogLog and Xanga and the second is to have a common interest and lastly by providing other readers with links to other blogs and a comment section.

References
Benschop, A 1997, Virtual Communities, viewed 5 November 2008, <http://www.sociosite.org/network.php>.

Effrat, MP, 1974, The Community: Approaches and applications, Free Press, New York

Hauben, M The Vision of Interactive Computing and the Future, viewed 5 November 2008, <http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/CompHum/Vision_pap.html>.

Putnis, P & Petelin, R 1996, Professional communication: Principles and Application, Prentice Hall, Sydney

Simons, M 2008, THE WEB: Towards a taxonomy of blogs, viewed 5 November 2008, <http://www.creative.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=229836>.

Technorati 2008, Blog Directory, viewed 4 November 2008, <http://technorati.com/blogs/directory>.

White, N 2006, Blogs and community: launching a new paradigm for online community?, viewed 5 November 2008, <http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/white.doc>.

Wikipedia 2008, Blog, viewed 5 November 2008, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#Types>.

Wikipedia 2008, MyBlogLog, viewed 5 November 2008, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyBlogLog>.