Can Blog Sites Replace Communities?
- Carmit Shaked
- Jul 1, 2004
- 5 min read
Background
Virtual knowledge communities have existed on the internet for a long time. These communities' main tools and communication channels are forums, email distribution lists, bulletin boards, etc. Knowledge communities also exist within organizations' internal networks. A knowledge community is a group formally defined as a group that engages in knowledge sharing and learning from experience about a shared domain. Typically, knowledge communities in organizations hold face-to-face meetings and, as a complementary tool, hold virtual meetings using knowledge sharing tools that include discussion groups, announcements, shared document spaces, FAQs, shared event calendars, and more.
About two years ago, a new communication channel emerged – blogs. A blog is a form of online publication, usually in a newspaper style. There are personal blogs – for personal publications on any topic worldwide, and group blogs – for publication on a defined and focused topic.
Research indicates that blog sites are more effective in creating meaningful interpersonal connections than central community sites. Is a network of blog sites destined to become a virtual community?
At first glance, you might say there's no logic in comparing blogs to communities. A blog can be compared to another form of sharing tool on the web. Therefore, the comparison presented here is between a group of people - a knowledge community - and a network of blogs.
So what do blog sites provide that other sharing tools don't?
Blogs show more respect for their authors and their target audience.
Blogs focus on the individual. They speak in the language of users, simple language, in other words, they "speak to the people." The blogger expresses their thoughts/ideas in their own words more meaningfully and completely. New blog readers can more easily navigate and dig among the author's latest blogs and better understand the writer's personality and current context.
Bloggers have no obligation to publish and are not required to adopt a format they are uncomfortable with. The blogger controls the input, editing, updating, and deleting of information at any moment. Simple WEB blog technologies allow new ideas to be relatively easily attributed to their authors, for example, through Trackbacks. This simple mechanism allows creating a "back link" from a page on another site to a page on your site. As such, blogs are better tools for self-promotion and marketing. In contrast, in community tools, especially knowledge communities in organizations, a content manager is responsible for editing, updating, and deleting information. Often, a community member who wrote a response or document cannot delete or edit it directly.
The reader is not committed to reading, responding, following, or taking any action whatsoever. In communities, there is a tendency toward club-like behavior, and the level of expectations from the user is higher. The organization invests in establishing communities and, therefore, often examines the investment (number of entries, number of discussions initiated, and number of responses given) to improve implementation or redirect it to other areas.
Blogs are a different style of communication tool.
Blogs do not allow easy identification of experts, but they allow better creation of expert profiles and easier tracking of experts. Ideas become stronger through deeper interactions and faster feedback loops. A network of blogs is open and self-organized. New ideas and information are freely distributed worldwide through references and Trackbacks. Search engines will better contain complete information on a specific topic, but blogs and Trackbacks will better contain quality information from people who share their opinions. The only limitation in the free flow of information is what the blogger has probably defined by including restrictions for their target audience through subscription.
And what do knowledge communities provide that blog networks don't?
Communities provide a better social structure for problem-solving, knowledge management, sharing, and growth.
Central and important problems addressed collectively must be kept under the constraints of a closed group of experts to receive a reliable and trustworthy response. The level of trust required to deal with problems, knowledge, and professionalism contradicts an open and uncontrolled social structure. It is difficult to distinguish whether the knowledge and solutions offered come from experts or people who understand the field, and we may use incorrect solutions from people whose understanding of the subject is sometimes insufficient. Within organizations, the situation is less severe since it is usually possible to know which respondents are experts with professional knowledge in the field.
A blog is usually poor in structured content: it mainly contains headlines, texts, dates, primary cataloging, and references. In contrast, to make reuse of knowledge, context-driven knowledge retrieval and content must be more structured and contain: description, keywords, information type, content type, data types, document types, summary, knowledge domain, subdomain, attributes, etc. Suppose knowledge preservation is done personally for personal needs or 2-3 people. In that case, such a level of cataloging is minimally practical. Still, such cataloging becomes more important when shared within a group to create order and organization and enable navigation and discovery in existing knowledge.
Indeed, new ideas can be transferred, discussed, and improved through a network of blogs. But for these ideas to become practical, they need to be supported by a group capable of translating them into action documents such as proposals, course plans, etc., and implementing them in group activities and projects.
Communities provide a better social structure for learning purposes.
Communities are self-organized societies engaged in a shared activity of learning about defined and relevant domains. They are formed around shared learning goals for specific agreed-upon domains and aim to build a shared understanding of a given knowledge domain. Their existence is sometimes backed by a charter written by them and adapted to them as a group. Knowledge communities have boundaries and access to community activity; their knowledge base is controlled and supervised. This is to build and maintain trust relationships between its members and foster high-quality conversations between experts.
Can blogs and communities live side by side?
Return to the title question, "Is the blog network destined to replace communities?" We've reviewed here what blogs have that communities don't and what communities have that blogs don't. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, the two can be combined instead of replacing communities with blogs. We can leverage the advantages of blogs and add them as another component in the community, like discussion groups, shared documents, and FAQs, and create a link to the community members' blog site.
As for the question, "Is a network of blog sites destined to become a virtual community?", the answer is yes. Communities are formed from groups of people who share an interest, have identical roles, or are engaged in a shared project. A community can also be formed from a network of blogs. Once a group of blog sites has created enough connections through blog entries and feedback and a network of links between them (TrackBack), they will want to take the next step with a more formal structure. Typically, a small group of 3-7 people meets face-to-face to organize a learning meeting for 20-60 bloggers simultaneously, usually through a face-to-face meeting. This meeting may create enough resonance to be the first in a series of meetings, as often happens when knowledge communities are created from nothing. Naturally, an energetic knowledge community creates projects after some time, which may turn from a regular social meeting into a start-up company. This is how a knowledge community develops around the activity of bloggers.
This review is based on a blog written by Martin Dugage and published on KnowledgeBoard.
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