On Blogging Australia

I know that I’ve banged on about this before, but community is important. It is about connecting, being social, and being of service. Community is sexy, and it helps grow your blog. You can build and participate in communities online or offline, and sometimes both.

I’m getting a lesson in the importance of community this week as part of The Mystery Project that I’m participating in with a bunch of other bloggers - many of them regular readers - that is being led by Snoskred and Meg. I’d like to take more credit for it but I haven’t participated as much as I’d like (work again) so they must take lots of bows when it does go public

The people who have joined in so far (in the last 24 hours or so) have been extremely enthusiastic - it has made me think about the role of that kind of shared community in ask-a-question-get-an-answer interactions - and I saw a similar thing happen with Laurel and friends on Twitter a couple of days back.

If this turns out to be a better Q&A mechanism for bloggers-helping-bloggers than just a blog alone,  I will have to rethink some assumptions. For a start, it may be that small niche-specific communities with a mix of experts and newcomers are a better information source than blogosphere+search service (Google/Technorati/Digg).

Time will tell. Watch this space for more information.