Full Circle Associates

This is part 3 in a series. So far we have Part 1 and Part 2. Part 4 will go up either over the weekend or on Monday. Time for a hot summer friday afternoon nap!

The second form is the Topic Centric blog community. No hub and spoke here, but a network formation.

Thisform is a community that arises between blogs linked by a common passion or topic. It is exemplified by groups such as food bloggers, mommy bloggers, political bloggers with a particular party or issue identification who are not the top bloggers in that niche, and travel bloggers. As I noted, I find as these grow, they are more network like than community like. Communities form within the network as people find more specific niches and interests.

In these communities power and identity is distributed across the network. The community does not rise or fall on one blog. It can scale out and form subcommunities easily.

There has been some interesting work trying to formalize such networks …

http://www.elsua.net/2006/04/28/welcome-to-the-kmbloggers-community/

And visualize the networks….

http://anjo.blogs.com/metis/2005/01/blogtrace.html

http://anjo.blogs.com/metis/2005/01/visual_settleme.html

http://infosthetics.com/archives/blog/?p=2

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2005/12/weblog_conversation_visualization_diagram.html

Now, a few examples....

Lee and Satchi LeFevers The World is Not Flat blog is a node in the travel blog community.


Global Voices aggregates many blogs more formally into a single site, a form that starts feeling like the third form of intentionally aggregated blogs into a community. Here we see member blogger Beth Kanter's page, an example of how identity can be formalized within these networks.