Over the past few months I have been thinking about the number of ways there are to create online communities. While not all online communities lend themselves to simple classification I have created a short working list of my own.

• Email groups or Listservers
• Newsgroups
• Forums
• Blog Communities
• Community websites

Over five years ago I wrote an essay about building online communities based on my own observations of a forum community that I had been a part of for a number of years. I believed then and still believe that that essay has relevance to other types of communities.

My intention with this entry is to briefly summarize the categories I use for grouping online communities. I intend to follow up with some additional entries to discuss a bit about each type of community.

Email Groups are probably the oldest form of community on the internet. Email was one of the original “killer apps” of the internet and it was not long before people created lists of email addresses around common interests. The listserver was born to help manage these lists. Generally a list is formed by an individual or group who then invite others to join. The list many have a huge membership but generally the number of people who actively and regularly contribute content to the list is small. Members sign up to receive all the email sent to a specific list. These messages are read and replied to using a standard email user agent. The list is generally kept private but the list owner can always determine who does (or does not) stay on the list.

Newsgroups (also called USENET news groups) were a logical extension of the email group. Posts are made to a group in much the same manner as an email is sent. In fact Outlook Express, generally thought of as a ubiquitous email program, is widely used to post to newsgroups. Posts as entries are called are stored in central servers. The servers in the system pass posts between each other and it may take some time for a post that is initially sent to one server to show up on other servers. Users connect to a server and read the posts that are being stored there. There is no membership list for a newsgroup. People can and do collect to the newsgroup once, look around and then never come back without anyone knowing they were “there.”  Ones presence is known only if one contributes a post.

Forums are another type of community based around a server that holds content. Forums generally take the form of a threaded discussion. That is to say that someone starts a topic and other people reply to it. A forum may have several sections or groups of topics. Some forums require a membership to read the data available but most allow anonymous read access. Writing to the forum generally requires that people enter some identifying information. This ranges from information that is completely unverified to information that requires confirmation using off-line means. Once again ones membership in the community (a definition of membership is a topic for an entry of its own)  is known only if one takes an active role in some way, usually by making a contribution to the forum’s content.

Blog Communities fit into two sub-categories. The blogging community site (Live Journal for example) includes specific features that connect blogs. For example they allow the blogger to list the people the blogs they read or the people they consider friends. They may also list the people who consider the blogger a friend. This explicit links create online connections to people who have a relationship that may extend into ‘real life.”

The second type of blogging community consists of people who regularly link to each other, share common interests but who do not necessarily share the same internet domain, type of blogging software or other built in connection. This type of community also includes people who comment at one blog on a regular basis. Those commenters create a dialog that makes a blog more than a one-way broadcasting of information.

Community Websites are web sites that are specifically created to form a community. Often blogging is part of it. Often forums are part of it. However, the most complete community sites though include multiple ways to interact. TheSpoke is a community site for young technology enthusiasts, especially those interested in software development. The Spoke includes blogging with many of the tools of a blogging site like LiveJournal but it also includes forums for discussion of special topics. It includes space for sharing software, pictures and other files. It also includes connections to activities such as the Imagine Cup – a set of competitions for students. So it is a bit of several things all of which, the creators hope, will create a long lasting community.

I’m not sure what sort of community will form around MSN Spaces. Will there be lots of closely linked blogs within MSN Spaces. Or will people who blog at MSN Spaces link outwards to people at other blog sites? Or will it be a mix? I’m not sure. I suspect that part of it will depend on what features and tools get added over time.

So those are my categories. Have I missed any? Have I got things wrong? Please let me know what you think.