Over the past week I have turned my focus mainly to the online communities formed through blogs. Sites such as the Sartorialist and Jak & Jil are photo blogs that encourage comments and discussion on each photo post.
They both average anywhere between 100 and 200 comments per post and have about 2 new photos per day. I was interested to see how much of a community is formed through these comment posts.
To do this, I posted as many times as I could on one particular photo entry on the Sartorialist.com. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many people referred to my comments and either agreed or disagreed.
However, I believe this was only the case because I commented 20 times on a photo that only got 64 total comments. On other, more popular photos, which received over 300 comments, it did not matter how many times I posted.
I believe this is because posts appear in order. Therefore, when a photo is receiving a lot of attention people simply either share their thoughts or refer to the posts directly preceding theirs. People do not take the time to read all of them.
Also, after about a week, all posts seem to stop all together. For example, the photo I commented on 20 times, died a few days later. I even posted a false statement, that would be sure to spark debate, and it still remains as the last comment.
In conclusion, these blogs do not foster as good of a virtual community as forums do. The comments move and fade-out too quickly. Because these blogs are updated so often, people never really focus on one thing and there attention is fleeting.
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