Full Circle Associates

This is part 4. If you missed them, there are also parts 1, 2, and 3

The third form is the community centric blog community. By this I mean a set of blogs that exist on one platform with a definite boundary -- usually in the form of registration and login. These are the communities where the blogs are most immediately proximate to each other. There is less emphasis on RSS and cross linking, and more on who is commenting on whose blog. Power is held in part by the "owner" of the platform who can impose rules on the community, but power is exercised by bloggers by frequency of posting (which often makes their blog more visible in the community), who hangs out commenting on whose blog and, if there are social networking features, the exposing of friendship and relationship structures.


Often these communities have other tools such as discussion boards, social networking features, wikis and instant messaging built in. The blogs are part of the overall ecosystem.

MySpace, Share Your Story and other online communities are examples of this form. Share Your Story started out as a discussion board based community and added blogs in July of 2005 and they were rapidly adopted as a way of offering one's personal voice within the overall community. The blogger has more control of the message than in a discussion board. They control the pacing by their own frequency of posting.

I hope to get to Part 5 tonight. We'll see. Still darned hot here in Seattle.