I’ve been thinking about blogs, blogging and communities a lot. I’ve got a working model so far. It starts like this.

An individual blog with no readers is clearly not a community. A blog that is only read by people who currently know the blogger is not a community but a part of the conversation that a person has with their existing community. In the case the blog may contribute to the strength of the social relationships. This is especially the case where a blogger uses their blog to communicate with a number of people across a wide geographic area. The typical young family who moved away trying to let the folks back home know how and what they are doing sort of blog.

The famous blog, think Wil Wheaton’s blog or Mark Cuban’s blog, is an interesting case and I’m open minded about this. To some extent it is a community but it is not a community of peers. Rather there is the god-like star who writes and the mass of fans who comment. It is the fan club relationship taken to an Internet level. I think this one really should be studied by someone. It has some interesting characteristics.

The so-called A-List or Alpha blogs are a bit different. Taken as individuals you have famous people, some of whom are famous for blogging and some of whom were famous first and blogged later, who at a casual glance seem to be the standard famous blogger. But if you look a little closer you see that they link to each other quite a bit. Their blogs comment on each other’s blogs and there is a direct dialogue between them. Many of these people meet face to face at various events. It seems to me that they constitute a clear, though lose, community. The readers who are not themselves “alpha bloggers” but who read and occasionally comment on these blogs are a part of the larger community. I suspect that sometimes these people find themselves elevated over time to alpha bloggers.

Robert Scoble, Microsoft Blogger, who is one of these alpha bloggers, has an article on how to get your blog some attention. That entry lists commenting on blogs as a way to get attention. But I think that most people comment because they have something to say and because they feel comfortable as part of the extended community. Those who read and comment are clearly an important part of making a community beyond just people taking input.

A deliberate community of blogs though is something like Live Journal or theSpoke. But they can also be less formal and smaller and more intimate. I am a member of a community of mostly high school and college students. Each active member has their own blog but all ten of the blogs are aggregated on the main page. People comment regularly and often. The comments are often full of inside jokes and references that would be opaque to outsiders. That sort of community is a more complicated construct similar to the family blog I referred to earlier. It is an extension of an existing community. It helps keep it going even though many of the people are away geographically.

It is going to be interesting to see what sort of community MSN Spaces develops into. I believe that all the blog types I write about here are possible. Only time will tell what sort of blogs become the majority and the defining characteristics though.