When I first
joined
the 21Publish team, there was a good amount of terminology that I
needed to adjust to. I am still adjusting to it and trying to figure
out how our customers perceive us. Some of the problems can be attributed to the proliferation of blog buzzwords ...
In any case, one of the most common misunderstandings I find in the market is regarding the notion of community blogs versus blogging communities (also sometimes known as "group blogs" or "multi-user blogs").
Community blogs
are predominantly websites where many authors can post journal entries
on a single space and where people can respond by commenting on posts
to the community blog.
Blogging communities
are collections of individual blogs
(potentially tens, hundreds, or thousands) tied together by a larger
common value or theme. Conversations can occur on the individual blogs,
between the blogs, on a common messageboard that binds the invidudal
blogs together in a community, or across other blogs in the blogosphere.
Blogging community services, a niche that 21Publish
occupies, specialize in providing value-add services that encourage
community interaction and the channeling of hot information within the
community. Example value-added features include:
* automatically highlighting hot discussions or "big debates" within the community
* tracking recent posts in the community
* being able to track (in one place) responses to comments an individual has left on other blogs within the network
* more sophisticated administration and configuration services than
enable the formation of groups (for restricting read and write
permissions), newsletter functions, and management of user
registrations (or synching of registrations with a company's existing,
internal databases).
* co-authoring capabilities (which are also present on many individual blogging platforms as well)
* others (and more to come).
I hope that this post has helped to clarify the difference between
community blogs and blogging communities. My next goal will be to try
to better understand how people view 21Publish. Although I view the
following terms as describing what 21Publish enables, having multiple
terms may confuse people:
* group blog
* multi-user blog
* blog community
* cooperative publishing (and/or content management).
Confusion may also be created by the fact that many of the individual
blogging platforms may the terminology above in a slightly different
way (mostly to reflect co-authoring capabilities).
Any preferences?
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