The question of blogging and communities

In response to my previous post, Frankie Roberto comments:

Surely, though, there is an argument that it’s harder to hold communities together when they are spread over a number of seperate weblogs than when they’re in a single hosted environment. RSS, trackback, CoComment and the like are all useful tools, but within a specialised online community, nothing can beat the immediecy and connected-ness of forums and similar.

I have no doubt about that either. There is also an argument that the simple text based interactions that took place asynchronously over dial-up or overnight connections lent themselves to a higher proportion of deeper, more thoughtful conversations. It sounds backward looking, and luddite but if something has been lost and that is recognised then it may also be recaptured in a higher form perhaps.
Developments in technology tend not to be driven by communty needs, but there’s no reason why they coudn’t be, in theory.

Of course, blogs and forums can work together. Sites like Livejournal, Warwick Blogs and to some extent MySpace all have personal blogs, but with a single sign-in that makes it easy to see replies to your comments and new postings, build friends lists and communicate much more immedietly.

That’s definitely the way things seem to be going, with enormously large, sticky and highly granulated constellations of online communities owned by just a few of the big media corporations. The old blogosphere is probably just a small backwater compared to these new, giant but isolated spaces. For example, did you know that Photobucket has over seven times the market share of Flickr? ( according to hitwise )

I think the answer to the question of which system works best depends on what the communities do and are for. For simply writing and reading about a general topic, weblogs allow more direct ownership of the platform and greater individualisation. For communities focused on specific tasks, or of people who need to work closely together, the more hosted communities might better facilititate the more immediete need for communication.

Yes but… that’s the answer to a question which hardly anybody is afforded the luxury to ask. We don’t generally get to sit down and design how a community is going to work and which tools people are going to gravitate towards. If a community forum already exists and is working well then it is inherent in the current state of things that some of the members will also be drawn towards blogging, and this will probably have an effect, either positive or negative – perhaps both – on the community. You can’t discourage people from blogging if it’s going to happen anyway, but you could encourage them I suppose, if you thought that was appropriate.

The problem that I’m also contemplating, is what do you do if you have a really specialised question which you want to get some answers or opinionms about? If there is an existent forum about the topic or a related one, then that can be a very powerful means of reaching out and tapping into expert knowlege. But if you simply post your question on your blog, you’re not likely to have much luck. Then again, experts seem to enjoy answering queries so even if they withdraw to their blogs to some extent, they may still keep an eye on the forum as well. But will that be enough to keep the forums alive in an overall environment with ever increasing choices and proliferation of channels?

Tags: blogs, blogging, technologyforcommunity