Taxonomy of Blogs and Blogging Community

First, Margaret Simons, a writer of Understanding the Media in Australia, tries to classified blogs with terminology adapted from past printing press classification. The classification is as below:

•Pamphleteering blogs, digest blog, advocacy blog, the popular mechanics, the exhibition, the gatewatcher blog, the diary, the advertisement, and the news blog.

Then the second one, Wikipedia, site compilation of many source, divided blogs into personal and corporate blogs with further classification as below:

• By genre - political, travel, fashion, education, niche, music, spam, family.
• By media type – videos, links, sketches, photo.
• By device – mobile device (mobile phone, PDA).

I personally think that the first classification by Margaret is the most effective. It is classified based on the specific function of the blogs overall and from point of view of the blogger. Means that the blogger decide what type of blog that he/she wants his/her blog is perceived as.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia divides its classification through three categories that a blog can be classified as more than one classification depends on the category. Example: a personal mobile photo fashion blog.

Blogging Community

According to Nancy White (2006), there are three main patterns in blogging community. One of those is topic centric community. It is a community network formation starts between linked blog with common passion or topic. And technology through tools able to keep this community alive and even bigger by shared tag, key word, mark post, discussion board, and comment section.



Example: see illustration below shows the network formation between three culinary blogs which each of them have many links to other related culinary blogs, start from high-class food art until homemade food blog.



Last but not least, seeing those facts, I strongly agree with Nancy’s opinion that said, “Community is alive and well in the blogosphere.”

Reference:

Simons, M 2008, Towards a taxonomy of blogs, viewed 7th June 2009, http://www.creative.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=229836.

White, N 2006, Blogs and Community –launching a new paradigm for online community? viewed 7th June 2009, http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community.

Wikipedia.org 2009, Blog, viewed 8th June 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog.