Blogging Community

The term "weblog" was first used by Jorn Barger on his Robot Wisdom website in 1997 (Auburn 1999, and Blood 2000) and is now used to describe personal websites that offer "frequently updated observations, news, headlines, commentary, recommended links and diary entries, generally organized chronologically." (Werbach 2001) While there are many websites that are frequently updated, "what makes a Weblog a Weblog is that it's organized chronologically and designed for short, frequent updates. In other words, Weblogs represent the online intersection of people and time. At this point, most blogs were websites that presented links to websites and news articles that the author found interesting, however blogs began to take new shapes as the medium began to gain mass. This process accelerated as the process of blogging became simpler with the advent of web-based tools such as Blogger, Pita, Groksoup, Diaryland, Live Journal and others. Online communities have sprung up around other media such as newsgroups, digital games, or chat rooms and have developed their own norms, unique to the medium and the culture of each group. Communities are about shared interest. Blogs are about individual interests. There are enough blogs out there that there are bound to be many bloggers who share the same interests, and thus are born communities of shared interest amongst blogs. Communities, whether blogs or otherwise, stick together because those common interests remain strong and the connections between the people engage the community members. For example, the fans of the band Phish developed social and behavioral norms on the Phish.net Usenet group that revealed shared values, which are also reflected in the list’s FAQ (Watson, 1997). Distinctive behavioral norms have also emerged in environments as diverse as a Usenet group for soap opera fans (Baym, 1998), a role-playing MUD (Schaap, 2002)