How a community develops?

The common denominator of all weblogs is personal publishing – and all bloggers who make entries in a weblog are doing this. Even though bloggers share their world with whoever is reading not all will want to be public, or be part of the weblog community. Bloggers, therefore, have to make decisions about their own publication and reciprocation, and whether they want to engage with the blogging community. Weblog software allows them to decide to whom they make content available, the level of privacy their weblog has, and the degree of interaction they want. Each weblog has the ability to be highly connected by utilising tools such as aggregators, blogrolls, commenting, specific site mentions, and trackback.

As mentioned earlier weblogs are personal publishing, and social software. Another argument for deflecting the focus away from the function of a weblog is that by not doing so the equally interesting social/community facet of weblogs... are overlooked. After an entry has been made in a weblog bloggers expect to be signalled and perhaps responded to. If not, why would they publish their thoughts on the Internet, instead of letting them sit in their personal files? We’ve already seen that bloggers demonstrated their willingness by making their weblogs public, and by having an identity.

[tag: community]