Multi-Author Blogging versus Community Blogging
This month’s London Bloggers Meetup focussing on ‘Multi-Author & Community Blogging’ promises to be another lively and informative discussion.
‘Multi-author’ or ‘community’ blogging seem like relatively simple concepts – how hard can it be to bring people with shared and/or common interests together to contribute content to a blog? In practice, as Andy and Bernie rightly allude to with their questions under this week’s topic, the success or failure of such collective endeavours depends on many factors, such as how you manage the pool of bloggers, cater to the various editorial needs, maintain thematic cohesion, motivate contributors to produce content, and ultimately achieve the object and purpose of the blog.
As Jason Keath nicely distils, ‘the three core ingredients in the special sauce that is a multi-author blog: contributors, content and editing’.
Before we touch on some of these issues, let’s first define exactly what is meant by ‘multi-author’ and ‘community’ blogging. Are they different? Does it matter?
Multi-author blogs by their very definition have more than one contributor, but that isn’t necessarily always the case for community blogs. In addition, the weight given to consistency in tone and topic across the content differs depending on how broad or focussed the blog is. In general, we tend to think that community blogs focus on shared interests and aim to be specific to the character of their community while multi-author blogs focus on common interests and aim to be all-encompassing. These subtle differences can certainly become problematic if not taken into account right from the start!
Multi-author blogs are blogs where the content is produced by more than one writer. Most multi-author blogs evolve from being a single-author blog through repeated iterations whereby frequent guest bloggers become regular ‘columnists’ if you will. Some of the benefits of such an approach is that it allows the founder of the blog to shift his focus to a meta level, from where he or she can oversee the general direction of the editorial content as opposed to focusing on the particularities of each of the articles that make up the index of content itself.
Significantly, a multi-author blog tends to reflect a community which emerges around a particular blog centred on some or other interests and any interests associated, or related, to it. It is these multiple manifestations of a specific focus that allows for multiple contributors to write for a blog ostensibly focused on one particular thing. Of relevance is the fact that the focus is deemed general enough for there to be enough of a variation in aspects of it for multiple points of view to be made. And in this comes the need for multiple writers, hopefully serving up content which reflects these multiple points of view.
This latter aspect is probably the most important point of differentiation between a multi-authored blog and a community blog. While the former grows in number of contributors based on the need for different aspects of the blogs topic to be considered, the latter grows in number of contributors due to the fact that the topic of that community’s blog is generally too specific for there to be many other blogs of a similar nature. Given this, it is mostly the case that community blogs represent the contribution of members of a community which existed before the emergence of the blog itself. The aim of a community blog is to reflect the interest of a community not necessarily centred on it, but centred on some more particular point of interest which it reflects. In contrast to this, a multi-authored blog is one which tends to emerge out of a need to reflect the growth of a community which is indeed centred on that blog; with its topic or point of common interest – i.e. its genre – tending to be something of a more general nature.
Of course, the nature of multi-authored and community blogs, as well as the relationship between the two, is a topic which lends itself to far more discussion than the above; indeed that is why events such as the London Bloggers Meetup are so important. What we offer above are simply some thoughts on one aspect of this discussion, and we look forward to learning much from the panel and audience alike!
Andy-
Great post! I’m considering the possibilities of utilizing a multi-author format for Greenland destination marketing, in part to conserve on the limited resources of the organization. I’m wondering if there were any follow up comments from this meet up, or any best practices from a managing stand point that you may be able to share. Thanks, and keep up the great work!
Ben