Blogs: How do we classify them?

The Variety of Blogs

There are many types of blogs which cater to the various interests of people. For example (Technorati, 2008):

• Entertainment
• Lifestyle
• Sports
• Business
• Politics
• Technology

The Community

A blogging community, also known as a virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, online social networks or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes (Wikipedia, 2008). These communities are able to gather bloggers of similar interests regardless of time and distance. There are many types of blogging communities such as photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music(MP3 blog), audio(podcasting) and Micro- blogging (Wikipedia, 2008).

How do we Create a Blogging Community?

There are 5 simple steps in achieving this. For example, discussions must be threaded or nested and not just "flat”, know that you have 2 types of readers which are those that know more than you do about any given topic and readers who don't know nearly as much as they think they do, understand that readers judge each other so therefore don’t judge them yourself, all good things must come to an end and lastly use free software (Miller, 2006).
An example of a blogging community would be Flickr. Flickr is a photo-sharing community and fellow bloggers are able to convene here and share their hobbies and similarities.
As the variety of blogs is huge, the classification system is ultimately unique to every individual.

References

Blog 2008, Wikipedia, viewed 11 November 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Blog directory 2008, Technorati, viewed 27 April 2008, http://technorati.com/blogs/directory

Miller, R 2006, Five rules for building a successful online community, Knight Digital Media Centre, viewed 12 November 2008, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060831miller/

Virtual Community 2008, Wikipedia, viewed 12 November2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_communities