Building a community on your blog with Yahoo Pipes

During a very hectic Web 2.0 Expo week in New York City, I did luckily find some time to work on my Dutch ebook about blogging. Chapter two concerns blogs and communities and I figured social media guru Erwin Blom was the man to interview about this material. So while enjoying a couple of beers in an Irish pub, we discussed whether blogs are communities or not.

We had a hard time coming to a solid conclusion. Sure, if you follow Shel Israel’s definition – “communities are bodies of people loosely joined together by a common interest” – , most blogs are in fact communities. Like Erwin Blom’s blog, where new media adapts come together with every new post.

Photo credit: sillydog

Conversation leader

If you read my last sentence again, notice the part that says when the media adapts come together. That’s the problem. Whereas most online communities aren’t top down, on blogs there is a leader. Blom decides what the discussion topic is. Therefore blogs may not fit the definition of a community.

Fact is though, that on a good blog, like-minded people try to come up with new ideas together. So how can you stimulate that beautiful process?

While I’m writing this, there’s a group of Wordpress developers working their ass of to launch a new version of Buddypress, a set of plugins that creates a social layer over Wordpress multi-user installations. That will turn Wordpress into the next social network. Yet while they’re working, why can’t we get a head start on our blogs?

Right back at you

I launched this blog a few months ago and it’s interesting to see how it slowly grows. After a few weeks, I already noticed several people coming back every time to leave a comment. Out of gratitude and curiosity, I started following them as well – meaning I left comments on their blogs and Twitter pages. This made them come back even more often to my blog.

Although it costs me time, I think it’s definitely worth it. So does Gary Vaynerchuk. The energetic Internet celebrity from WineLibrary TV gave a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo this week. He told the crowd he still answers every mail he receives (on airplanes mostly). It’s the foundation of his success: “I hustle about meeting every single person on earth.”

Photo credit:
IT.com.mk

Smart feeds

Yes, it’s gonna cost you time. And yes, you don’t have any. BUT, if you decide to invest in every single follower you have, it will definitely pay off. Not just in money or traffic, but also in friendships. So the questions isn’t if we gonna build a community, but how we’re gonna do it.

Of course, this is a complex process, but I would like to get you started with a simple effort that will make the whole following back thing somewhat easier and structured. It’s about smart feeds people.

• I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe in which I aggregate all the blog posts of people I admire and often welcome on Dutchproblogger.com and The Next Web.
• After lunch, I check this feed, read the posts, and leave comments when I think I’ve something interesting to say.

I’ve found out that I actually have some time left to invest in my blog community, I just needed to structure the process first.

Further reading watching

Some other posts you might be interested in:

• Getting readers to comment by writing an unfinished blog post
• Give your blog some soul with a Facebook fanbox