Community Behind Every Blog

At one time, outsiders considered the internet to be nothing more than a virtual hangout for the tragically reclusive, the depressive loner, and hormonal teenagers seeking a surreptitious buzz without the embarrassment of printed materials.

Of course, everyone now knows how far from the truth such an image is, at least among those perusing the Sciencetext website. I cannot vouch for other corners of the interwebs or some of the slimier tubes out there, however, but then Google now has malware scanners installed to keep you safe and sound.

Anyway, instructional systems experts Vanessa Dennen and Tatyana Pashnyak of Florida State University are well versed in the ins and outs of getting the most out of the internet in an educational capacity. Recently, they published new research data that help explain the role of reader and blogger responses in establishing a blog community.

As we all know, blogging has become an increasingly popular form of written communication, with blogs springing up in every possible niche from esoteric sciences to alternative lifestyles and from blogs about blogging to blogs about teaching. “Blogs can be many things to many people,” the researchers say, “but can they support the development of an online community?” This is an important question for educators and students alike where a sense of community can provide a much stronger learning or professional development environment. Dennen and Pashnyak focused on interlinked blogs that span personal and professional content, authored by faculty and graduate students at various universities and then asked: “How do we know if community has developed amongst a collection of blogs?”

They suggest that one way to reveal the existence of an electronic community is to consider the degree to which bloggers and their readers share resources, content, and links and to discover the interdependencies among the participants. Counting reciprocal links and blogroll entries is one way to determine connectivity among blogs in a putative community. However, the trail of comments, and responses to blog posts in the form of trackbacks and citations is probably a much more revealing measure of community. The researchers explain the distinction:

When two blogs link to each other, one can say that at some level the two bloggers acknowledge each other. Comments, however, imply action readership; they make visible a greater level of connection. Comments to blogs vary in their depth and focus, as well as their indicators of familiarity with the blog and blogger.

Familiarity is key to a sense of community, few people feel part of a community if no one knows them and they know no one. Comments that refer to past events chronicled on a particular blog or statements indicating how long a commenter has been reading that blog, reveal a nuance of familiarity. “Readers with prolonged engagement will be best able to determine whether a particular commenter is familiar and if the comment fits within the larger narrative context of the blog,” the researchers add.

They report details of a content analysis of blog posts and ensuing comments within a sample of blogs from an established informal online community in a forthcoming issue of the aptly named International Journal of Web Based Communities (2008, 4, 272-283). They point out that various well-define characteristics emerged from their study:

The bloggers themselves post on topics that are tied to a shared practice among community members, engage in storytelling and reflection and invite comments.

The team concludes that blogs have become established as a relatively safe place for the communal sharing of experiences and ideas, at least within the educational framework. “Our study happens to be about faculty and graduate students, but doesn’t really have implications for classroom use of blogging,” Dennen told Sciencetext, “Really the implications are for professional communities, professional development contexts, informal communities of practice, etc.”

Blogs do get seriously spammed and scraped but they are on the positive side dialogs within wide-reaching commentary can evolve. Robust discussions emerge that may turn out to be invaluable to the current and future readers, the commentators, and the bloggers within the community.