An application for creating blogging communities (blogospheres)

I think all of these components are critical, but only the first two are worth the cost of building them yourself. Community creation is in large part a face-to-face activity that can be enhanced by technology, but is not technology-centric. Most community-oriented blogging tools (e.g., technorati, pubsub) are oriented to blogging at large and are hard to bend to the task of creating the individual community. How to use them is also sometimes so opaque as to be hard to decipher even by experts. Second, the unique resource of any blogging community are the set of posts community members make. In gross, they form a context for understanding what the community is about. Therefore, it is worth it to produce tools to help community creation because that is where the unique value is.

Let me start though with what I would outsource: the blogging system and the client tools. These have become commodities, but there are some requirements that may not be obvious.

What I'd Outsource

Blogging systems are complex, maturing technologies where several companies (typepad, blogger, MSN Spaces) have spent a great deal of effort figuring out the last user-interface mile and the whole blog post publishing/syndication process. There is little chance you can even duplicate this let alone exceed it. Similarly, client aggregators have spent a lot of effort on user interface and figuring out how to consume syndication feeds.

It's not that the decisions about which blogging system and which aggregator client to use are not important. It's just that recreating either one of those is so much work, it's not worth it. You'll almost certainly be worse than an existing system. Here are some of the critical features we would look for in outsourced blogging systems:

• Get the simplest possible interface for posting. You want people to participate and to make that as simple as possible. In BIT320, a class on databases at the University of Michigan, we used typepad. In BIT301, an introductory class on information systems, we used blogger. One person who used both summed up the differences rather well and expressed a preference for blogger, even though it is missing some of the key features she herself has found useful in the class.
• Get the simplest possible interface for configuring the blog. Here again, blogger seems to win.
• Make sure that you are not responsible for individual blog uptime or maintenance. This can be remarkably time consuming and will sink you with more than a handful of bloggers. Blogger and typepad are equivalent here.
• Make sure that the blogging system religiously supports web standards in a way that is conformant with other tools, particularly the major syndication formats (RSS 1.0 and 2.0 as well as atom). Blogger only publishes atom as its syndication format. Typepad does all three, but it's atom format has proven unreadable on occasion due to a specific namespace it uses.
• A bookmarklet that allows users to make posts to their blog as they view webpages in their browser is also critical. Ideally, the bookmarklet would automatically link to the page and excerpt any selected text. The more of the system's features can be accessed from the default bookmarklet the better. Blogger's bookmarklet is adequte. Typepad's is advanced but sometimes hard to fully figure out, even for smart users.
• User categories seem real important. If you can get people to agree on categories, you can group posts into conversations as Don Park suggests for the world at large and as we have done in BIT320. Blogger does not have categories.
• Trackback pings are nice but a difficult feature to fully get to work. The best approach is if they are taken care of on the server side as is the case with MovableType, a standalone version of typepad. Typepad supports trackbacks, but blogger does not.
• Image uploading is a bit of a gew-gaw. People seem to like it because it creates a sense of being there or immediacy or intimacy or what-not. Oddly, although blogger uses a third-party service for this, people seem to have had an easier time with the blogger method than the typepad method.

The other thing I would outsource is the client tool for tracking the blogosphere. The simplest tool is a web browser that can access a web page that presents a snapshot of the blogosphere's activities. This type of access has to work well because many users, for whatever reason, will be forced to use this interface. A more satisfying interface is a feedreader. There are many possible feedreaders, but the one that works by far the best is Sage. Why Sage? It has the chief advantages of being free, well-designed, and an extension of the firefox web browser and therefore cross-platform.

Another nice thing about Sage is that its interface directs you back to the original site for your page reading. This facilitates linking to the original site and getting a trackback when you post via the bookmarklet.

What I Would Not Outsource

The basic blogging interface elements are obvious candidates for outsourcing because there are so many competitors already doing such a great job. It would be hard to beat them. However, the same cannot be said for the back-end workings required to create a sense of community and get people to participate.

In my estimation, there are three unique features of blogging communities that few have paid attention to in terms of creating coherent tool sets available for blog community builders:

• Community zeitgeist
• Community conversations
• Community archives

In future posts I will describe how I am going about creating these with some external clients.