Virtual Neighbourhood

Mortensen (cited in Efimova, Hendrick, Anjewierden, 2005) noted that blogs may be a personal writing space, but its nature is to communicate with others in order to make the blogger present. Blogs are connected by having blogrolls, permalinks, comment sections, and trackbacks (Marlow, 2004).

Yoskovitz (2007) suggested eight steps to creating a blog community one person at a time:

1. Write to get more comments.
2. Reply to comments.
3. Visit commenters’ sites.
4. Email people a word of gratitude.
5. Email people links of interests.
6. Track the most popular content.
7. Make content accessible and readable.
8. Join online communities.

Examples of blogging communities are such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalogue, and Nuffnang. Nuffnang is Asia’s first and leading blog advertising community, founded by Cheo Ming Shen and Timothy Tiah from Malaysia (Wikipedia, 2008). Bloggers who register can post up advertisements by companies like Citibank, Honda, Nokia, AirAsia, Nike and more. This community currently has 40,000 registered users from Malaysia and Singapore.

The blogosphere consists of different categories of blogs according to topics of interests. Among the various blogs classified by interest (Technorati, 2008) are entertainment, politics, business, lifestyle, sports and technology. Blogs labelled by the type of media (Teh, 2007) includes vlog (video blog), linklog (consists of links), sketchblog (contains portfolio of sketches), photoblog (photos as primary content), and tumblelog (consists of short entries with mixed media types).

References:

Efimova, L, Hendrick, S and Anjewierden, A 2005, Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations, ‘Finding "the life between buildings": An approach for defining a weblog community’, Chicago, Illinois.

Marlow, C 2004, International Communication Association Conference, ‘Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community’, MIT Media Laboratory, New Orleans.

Technorati 2008, ‘Blog Directory: Topics’, viewed 11 November 2008, <http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/>. 

Teh, PPL 2007, Review Papers , ‘An insight of blogosphere over the Internet’, University College Sedaya International, Malaysia.

Wikipedia 2008, Nuffnang, viewed 11 November 2008, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuffnang>.

Yoskovitz, B 2007, ‘8 steps to growing your blog community one person at a time’, Instigator Blog, viewed 11 November 2008, <http://www.instigatorblog.com/8-steps-to-growing-your-blog-community-by-1/2007/01/09/>.