Blogs and Community Engagement

Pew Internet and American Life has a new interesting report out about blogging. Their research shows that most people are blogging to share their personal experiences and knowledge and most blogs have only a small number of readers. Bloggers are blogging for creative, personal expression and to share their knowledge. Knowledge sharing is one of my main reasons for blogging. If I read an interesting article or learn something new, it’s fun to share it.

Read the report here: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp

With something like 49 million blogs, you can find a blog on every topic you can imagine and many topics that you never even would have thought of before. I checked out technorati to see what the most popular blogs are and was surprised at some of the topics.

The 6th most popular is http://postsecret.blogspot.com. It is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard – fascinating. Maybe I missed it but I don’t think Ira Glass from This American Life (http://www.thislife.org) has interviewed the guy who thought that one up yet.

The 90th most popular blog is the kind of thing that my dad usually sends me links to. It’s Stuff On My Cat (http://www.stuffonmycat.com) Hmm maybe I’ll get out my digital camera and put some stuff on my cat. Maybe that would help improve my blog ranking!

Next week I’ll be at the Public Radio Marketing and Development conference in New Orleans. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll blog a few thoughts from some of the sessions. One of the sessions that I’m helping to organize is called “Community Engagement – Exploring What we Really Want.” The session will explore the upside as well as the struggles involved in community engagement such as:

• If you have a bulletin board should it be moderated or not?
• How does community journalism with participation by a variety of listeners impact a public radio station’s reputation as a trusted source?
• Where might lines be crossed in both online and offline community engagement?

These are all issues that all companies and organizations struggle with to some extent. In preparing for this session, Don Derheim from KQED shared a very interesting link to a blog post from one of their station’s hosts who was an identity theft victim on “My Space” – scary! Read about it here: http://blogs.kqed.org/joshkornbluth/?p=112#comments

So if you’re a blogger why do you blog? What do you think about the blogs in the top 100? Any experiences in the area of community engagement that we might want to be sure to share in our conference session?