Collaborative blog

A collaborative blog or a group blog is a type of weblog in which posts are written and published by more than one author. The majority of high-profile collaborative blogs are based around a single uniting theme, such as politics or technology.

In recent years, the blogosphere has seen the emergence and growing popularity of more collaborative efforts, often set up by already established bloggers wishing to pool time and resources to both reduce the pressure of maintaining a popular website and to attract a larger readership.

Types

While every collaborative blog is unique they can usually be placed in one of two broad categories. An "invite only" collaborative blog is one in which a founder blogger personally selects a small group of co-bloggers, inviting them to contribute to his or her blog. The Invite Only blog typically focuses on a single common interest subject – e.g., politics, legal issues or, occasionally, comedy. Bloggers on a particular topic are invited to contribute to the contents. Resultant posts are edited or curated prior to being published. Such blogs have been created by online media, as well as Domain Experts in entrepreneurship, data mining , and environment. Conversely, Open Invite collaborative blogs allow any user to register for a blogging account, providing instant access. Much like online forums, the accessible nature of the Open Invite collaborative site is protected by dedicated moderators and fellow bloggers who will act quickly to quell any signs of spamming. In recent years the blogosphere has seen the emergence of many new invite only collaborative blogs, each accepting contributions from a group of established bloggers. As for invite only collaborative blogs, individuals with specialized expertise can post preliminary thoughts and foster discussing and information sharing.

Collaborative blogs are similar to, but not the same as, web-based blog aggregators as the latter usually pull data from other single-user blogs to present a more constantly updated, semi-collaborative stream of information. Collaborative blogs are different from common blogs and other web 2.0 websites as individuals can modify, add to, or delete the contents from other users and usually do not need to understand the components of a Web page work.

Popularity

The popularity of collaborative blogs has soared. For example, WordPress, created in 2005, has more than 409 million people viewing more than 15.5 billion pages each month.

See also

• Web 2.0