Full Circle Associates

This is part 2. If you haven't seen part 1, you can find it here!

So this is where I try to describe the three forms of blog communities. I find it easier to do this F2F where I can flail my arms and do the body language thing. It requires less precisions. And this is a very warm Friday afternoon, so this may not be so precise. Be kind.

I have been noticing that blog based community shows up in three main patterns. I’m sure there are more than the three I’m sharing here, but these three show up pretty consistently. By looking at the patterns we can start thinking about strategic approaches to blogs as a medium for community development. We can look at them in terms of their:

• technology/design - the impact of how the blogging tools are deployed,
  
• social architecture, processes and interactions,
  
• the role of content, and
  
• other issues such as scalability and lifecycle.

And of course, we can look at what happens at the intersections of these forms.

Here are the three:


Let's run through them one at a time.




This is where the blog of a single individual, organization or cause attracts people who eventually constitute the community. The main identity and power is usually centralized (the blogger decides if comments are allowed, what is rejected, terms of engagement, etc.). The community would run a high risk of disappearing if the central person stopped blogging or removed their blog.