Blogging Community or Circles and Cliques?
As I explore the blogosphere daily researching articles for my blog, I’m finding a disturbing trend of blogging cliques and circles. Some of these I would even go so far as to call "blogging covens."
I read the comments section of these blogs that are over-inflated with effusive commentary left by the fan base of the authoring blogger. You can tell who’s in and out of the circle by which comments are replied to and which are not. From what I’ve learned about building community, it’s good practice to reply to each and every comment.
Of course many bloggers have a ‘commenting policy’ and, based on
that policy, choose to reply to comments or not. I often see comments of value going unanswered and comments, some of which have no value, mostly just stroking the ego, being replied to. I often follow links back to the commentator's blogs to find the same bloggers commenting over and over on each others blogs.
Some bloggers will build their readership, or fan base, which appears to be a community, but once built all sense of community is lost. The circle is closed.
And many bloggers seeking advice or insight are shunned in favor of ‘friends’
who tweet, re-tweet, digg, re-blog, like and stumble the content good, or bad of their friends. This affects linking behaviors and how those links and content rank, which helps determine the authority of a blogger.
In my opinion this is a side effect of social media and social networking. However, with that being said, I’m not anti-social media as I rely on it myself.
In closing, I think building community through commentary has lost a good deal of the ‘relational spirit’ that dominated the blogosphere in the early days of blogging.
As blogging has moved into a new era through social media and social networking, the blogger has taken on a new persona and mindset that may or may not be true to the spirit of blogging in the most organic sense of what blogging really is: a community, not a coven.
Follow Technorati