Are blog communities better than individual blogs?

One of my readers, Sajjaad sent me an e-mail few days back and asked me this question. He wanted to know whether starting a blog in a blog community was in fact better than starting an individual blog in a free blogging platform. What he didn’t say was “Hint – this is a trick question”:-)

Well, the easiest answer to this question would be – “It depends on you needs”.

For the average person just wanting to maintain a personal journal and not take the whole “blogging for money thing” really seriously and who just want to leave out the technical jargon of the equation, I’d say blog communities would be a better choice.

Thoughts.com is one of those considerably large blog communities that are noteworthy here. Thoughts.com offers many features that wouldn’t necessarily be found on a free blog community, including unlimited bandwidth. Uploading photos to your own photo album, sharing community hosted videos, having your own podcast, conducting online polls with your friends, connecting with other community members on a forum, and most importantly, connecting with friends with similar interests is all inclusive in your free membership.

So, for a person with “not much” technical know-how trying to implement a membership site with forums and all that to connect with friends, do podcasts and etc can be fairly hard. Fortunately, networks like thoughts.com make it fairly easy for them.

And also, joining a blog community can be a fairly easy way of connecting with like minded individuals in comparison to other blog platforms, thanks for features like intra-community groups.

Although a blog community like thoughts.com offers all these features, sometimes it’s likely that the lack of flexibility may drive the visitors to individual blog platforms. But as I said, if you just want to have a “personal journal” kind of thing and want to test the waters of a potential time consuming hobby, then yeah, you will find thoughts.com very appealing.

Take their tour or Create Blog now.

2 Responses to “Are blog communities better than individual blogs?”

1. Pamela's Sweating Cures says:

   December 12, 2008 at 12:32 am

   Stumbled on this by almost accident. I’m glad I made a good read out of this. This will go into my bookmarks folder. Cheers!
2. homepage optimieren says:

   January 25, 2009 at 11:39 am

   Definitely an awesome read. Really useful information.