Classification of Blogs

With the emergence of blogging, bloggers have created diverse content for many reasons, such as to increase the uniqueness of their blogs, or to attract more readers. As such, many different types of blogs have emerged.

Accroding to thinkquest.org, blogs are divided into 2 types, namely, text based and other media.

Under "text based", they are further broken down into 5 different categories;

PERSONAL

Bloggers’ personal lives take center stage in many blogs
(Source: blogcatalog.com)

COLLABORATIVE

A collaborative blog is when an administrator sets up a blog account and two or more different users are allowed to publish posts, such as to maximize the amount of content.

CORPORATE

(Source: ester-c.com)

Nowadays, business corporations are also embracing the power of the Internet to promote and advertise their firms.

TOPICAL

(Source: kyspeaks.com)

There are blogs that do not document about their personal lives but rather, review on topics of their interest.

SPAM

Spam blogs, or splogs, are mostly set up automatically by ‘bots’ (computers performing a series of automated functions autonomously), and are intended to promote commercial companies or products. These blogs contain nonsensical or repetitive text, and there is usually mass-linking, or the creation of a great number of unnecessary links.

Under "other media", they are further broken down into podcasts/videocasts and photologs.

Creating and maintaining a blog is totally different from the literature texts and has a different purpose as it is an information genre. It does not work in symbols or metaphors, but in providing factual information in words, graphics and images. its purpose is to give the reader who enters this site a variety of information. (Walsh 2006)

In a media report between Anthony Funnell and media analyst, Margaret Simons, they have talked about the different types of blogs and Margaret Simons has drawn up her list of the different types of online sites that classify as blogs. They are:

• Political Blogs
• Digest Blogs
• Advocacy Blogs
• Popular Mechanics Blogs
• Exhibition Blogs
• Gatewatcher Blogs
• The Diary
• The Advertisement
• News Blogs
• Pampleteering Blogs

In my opinion, there is no correct way for us to categorize everybody's blogs into their types. This is because some may want their blogs to be personal and at the same time, a review, while some would rather password protect their blogs for limited people to view.

BLOGGING COMMUNITIES
Communities, according to dictionary.com, is a social group of size whose members reside in a specific locality, shared government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.

Today, online communities are popular in the Internet. As blogging has gained wider adoption, blog based community shows up in three different patterns with a wide variety of hybrid forms emerging between the three;

• The Single Blogger Centric Community
• The Central Connecting Topic Community
• The Boundaries Community

One of the most popular blogging community would be Nuffnang, with the aim to allow advertisers to serve graphic or video based advertisements onto the thousands of local blogs that are signed up with us.



(Source: nuffnang.com.my)

If I were to create my own blogging community, I would creating a poll system where readers are able to rank my published posts and at the same time, have a comment or forum section.

References

The Media Report, A taxamony of blogs, viewed 13th November 2008.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript

Blogging- The Phenomenon, Text Based, viewed 13th November 2008.
http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/01130/typesofblogs_textbased.html

Blogging- The Phenomenon, Other Media, viewed 13th November 2008.
http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/01130/typesofblogs_othermedia.html

Wikipedia 2008, Blog, viewed 13th November 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog