Finally managed to finish reading + listening Nancy White’s great article on Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?
Great piece on why, what and how’s of building communities through blogs.

Click to listen to Nancy’s wonderfully engaging podcast. (28.6 MB)

Click to download the print versions Blogs and Community Word.doc (447 KB) or Blogs and Community PDF(427 KB).

Abstract

Online community has been an important part of the Internet, mainly forming around email lists, bulletin boards and forums. In recent years, the ascendancy of blogs has introduced a new platform for communities. This article looks at some of the emerging patterns of blog based communities and raises some questions for their strategic application.

Part of the discussion came in as comparing merits of Blogs Vs Forums as community building tool. Tony Karrer followed the article and commented:

What’s Better to Build Community: Blogs or Forums? – Compares conversation in blog world vs. forums. What struck me was:

• In general, blogs are great at connecting and bridging to a NEW community.
• In general, forums are great at harnessing and growing an EXISTING community.

Put in a different way, blogs allow us to grow a community without going to a single location. A forum or mailing list is most effective if everyone agrees to go to that single location and abide by those norms. Blogs allow community to be formed based on common interests and the community grows and evolves in a very fluid manner.

In my recent experiences with COP’s I got a little different result in this case. In any established community, forums actually creates number of silos of individuals, which mostly promotes ‘buy-in’ by most of the people following a few. In the process both individualism and true ‘connected’ intelligence get sacrificed. Yes the Collective Intelligence or Group-Think emerges – but that ‘wisdom of crowds’ is actually the brain child of few ‘socially influential’ people.