Blogging Roller

I spent Friday and Saturday in Greensboro, NC at the ConvergeSouth 2005 conference. I had a great time meeting fellow NC bloggers and attending talks on community building, blogging and journalism, collaboration, blog tools and podcasting. The next couple of posts will be my trip report, based on my notes and recollections.

Day one of the conference focused on new journalism and the media. The first session I attended was Blogging and Community Building, which was led by David Hoggard, Ruby Sinreich and Bora Zivkovic. Ruby talked about Orange Politics, a local politics/community activism website which uses blog software (Wordpress), but is really more of a moderated community forum. Ruby is one of several site editors who have the ability to post new topics and moderate reader comments. She said that having well chosen topics and good moderation is very important, otherwise the flames can spin out of control.

Bora Zivkivic talked about the concept of a blog carnival, a concept originated by NC bloggers at Siflay Hraka. A blog carnival is a roaming blog anthology. A bunch of bloggers decide to participate in a carnival on a specific topic, they all submit their best posts on the topic and on carnival day the host of the carnival posts a summary that describes and links to all of the posts that were submitted. The next time the carnival is held, it's hosted by a different blogger. Everybody involved gets an increased flow of new readers, finds interesting new things to read and of course, some extra google juice from all the cross-linking. As of today, you can browse 108 individual carnivals at blogcarnival.com.

You know, we didn't realize it at the time, but the Open Solaris launch was a blog carnival. Everybody involved did their best to come up with interesting and insightful posts on topics related to Open Solaris and on launch day we turned the blogs.sun.com front page into an aggregation of Open Solaris blogs; a sort of robotic blog carnival host. Within a day after the launch, Sun blogger Bryan Cantrell stepped up and starting doing the work of a real-live human blog carnival host with his posts Sifting through the blogs, More blog sifting and Yet more blog sifting. By the way, it was a great success; here's a good summary by Andy Lark.

Some of the other ideas for blog community building were community aggregators, meet-ups and blog teach-ins to help newbies get started with blogging. David Hoggard mentioned the Greensboro101 and NCBlogs aggregators and the value of face-to-face meet-ups in bringing a community together. Brian Russell brought up the idea of having teach-ins to help newbie bloggers get started, which has worked well for new bloggers in Greensboro and the Triangle areas.

Most of the ideas discussed in the session are pretty well known in the Java and Open Solaris communities. We've been using community aggregators (e.g. planetsolaris.org, planetsun.org, javablogs.com, etc.) and, of course, meet-ups (e.g. Java and now Open Solaris user group meetings) for some time now. We've discussed teach-ins for new bloggers at Sun, but we haven't followed through on that yet.

Near the end of the session, Dave Winer asked why we care about building communities, is it all about getting hits and flow, and what's the point? Based on the responses from the panel and the audience, I'd say the point of blog-based community building is to work towards the shared goals of a community whether that is to change local politics, share good writing, or build and support a great open source operating system.

Tags: topic:{technorati}[ConvergeSouth], topic:{technorati}[Blog Carnival], topic:{technorati}[Open Solaris], topic:{technorati}[Community Building]