Tea Time Musings #3: Of blog classifications and blogging communities

Dear readers,

Harassed by the ubiquitous emergence of blogs?

Krishnamurthy (cited in Su et al. 2005) classified blogs into four quadrants: personal vs. topical and individual vs. community (see Figure 1). For example, blogs displaying personal content can be shared to specific individuals or to a community.

Figure 1

Source: Krishnamurthy (cited in Herring et al. 2005)

Also, blogs are classified by:

Subject matter

• Politics - "blog.limkitsiang.com"

• Fashion - "bryanboy.typepad.com"

• Food/Travel - "vkeong.com"

Device

• Moblogs

Doring and Gundole (2005, p. 212) highlights the one-of-a-kind quality of moblogs, stating “…moblogs may not only be uploaded from stationary computers but also, or exclusively, from mobile technology.”


Media types

Roy (2004) defines these blog types as:

• Vlog - collection of videos (tech.yahoo.com/blog/vlog).
  
  

• Linklog - compilation of links (www.iamcal.com/linklog/).

• Sketchblog - portfolio of sketches (kristens-sketchblog.blogspot.com/).

• Tumblelog - short postings with a mix of media types (http://project.ioni.st/).

Status of publishers

• Corporate blogs - used “… internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes…” (Roy 2004).

Additionally, Simons (2008) classifies blogs into 9 categories, namely, “The Diary”, “The Advertisement” and “The Pamphleteering Blogs” to name a few.

Classification is tricky as blogs share two or more of the aforementioned styles. Nevertheless, through my observation of search queries via Google Trends, classification by subject matter is most effective as the volume of search queries by subject matter is larger compared to media types, device or status of publishers (see Figure 2). Conversely, Krishnamurthy’s classification is too simple while Simons’ classification, though more detailed, is still too broad.

Figure 2

Source: Google Trends 2009

Thinking of starting a blogging community?

White (2006) suggests the components of a blogging community:

• “Comments” - response to content.
  
• “Tags” - keywords associated to content.
  
• “Mashups” - content comprises of various sources.
  
• “Permalinks” - permanent links available after content is archived (Credo Reference 2006).

Types of blogging communities

White (2006) divides blogging communities into “the SingleBlog/Blogger Centric Community, the Central Connecting Topic Community and the Boundaried Community”.

For instance, the Harvard Law School blog community seen below, a form of “Boundaried Community”, hosts a collection of blogs exclusive to Harvard Law students. Students can link their blogs to their peers, fostering greater information exchange and community bonding.


In conclusion, individuals must choose their own classification method to simplify the intricacies plaguing the blogosphere. Also, though blogging communities unite bloggers of similar interests, issues such as privacy remain.



References

Credo Reference 2006, High definition: an A to Z guide to personal technology, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston.

Doring, N & Gundole, A 2005, ‘Your life in snapshots: mobile weblogs (moblogs)’, in Thumb culture: the meaning of mobile phones for society, eds P Glotz, S Bertschi & C Locke, transcript Verlag, Germany, pp. 211-224.

Herring, SC, Scheidt, LA, Wright, E & Bonus, S 2005, ‘Weblogs as a bridging genre’, Information Technology & People, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 142-171.

Roy, B 2004, Beginner’s guide to journalism, Pustak Mahal, India.

Simons, M 2008, Towards a taxonomy of blogs, Creative Economy Online viewed 13 June 2009, <http://www.creative.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=229836>.

Su, NM, Wang, Y, Mark, G, Aieylokun, T & Nakano T 2005, ‘A bosom buddy afar brings a distant land near: are bloggers a global community?’, in Communities and technologies 2005: proceedings of the Second Communities and Technologies conference, Milano 2005, eds PVD Besselaar, GD Michelis, J Preece & C Simone, Springer, pp. 171-190.

White, N 2006, Blogs and community – launching a new paradigm for online community?, The Knowledge Tree, viewed 14 June 2009, <http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community>.