0 E-Collaboration within Blogging Communities of Practice Vanessa Paz Dennen Florida State University, USA Tatyana G. Pashnyak Florida State University, USA Copyright © 2008, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. IntroductIon The act of blogging is not an inherently social or com- munity-oriented one, but increasingly blogs have been used both as a forum for sharing information with and interacting with others and as a huge repository of information and opinions to be collected, organized, and shared. New blogs are being created at a very quick rate; Technorati, a blog-indexing company, estimates that they are tracking over 70 million blogs as of February, 2007, a number that is continuously growing (Technorati, 2007). Combined with current trends toward online social networking and learning communities, it is not surprising that blogs have been used to support e-collaboration. Blogging communities have developed in two ways. First, through this proliferation of blogs, individuals with like interests have found each other and built online connections. Second, people with real-life connections have realized the potential of blogging technology to facilitate collaboration and have purposefully created blogs to support their efforts. This article provides an overview of how blogging communities of practice are defned, have developed, and have come to use the tools for e-collaboration. Background The Internet was developed in part to bring together groups of people who are separated by time and space, and the concept of people working together in virtual communities stretches back to the pre-Web days of this technology (Rheingold, 2000). Blogging is an act that can be done individually, but has come to be done collaboratively by many people over the years. It is essentially involves writing and publishing brief posts to a Web page in reverse chronological order. The defnition of blog contains no requirement of an external audience, interactants, or discourse; a blog could be a personal diary, a log of work, or a collection or personal links intended for the authors’ eyes only. That blogging became a community-oriented activity in some contexts is perhaps more indicative of a desire for technology-mediated communication than of anything inherent in the technology itself, which did not extend beyond basic Web-page creation. Communities, in the general sense, may be cultural, geographical, or based on interest. An online community might be any of these three, but defning community can prove a big challenging. The word community often is used rather casually with reference to people communicating via the Web. Any collection of people who might communicate online has come to be called a virtual community, and corporate entities have used the concept of online community as a marketing strategy. However, online community is based on more than just the ability to communicate with others, reading the same blog or having signed up for the same bulletin board or email list. Just because people read the same online newspaper, for example, does not make them a community; individual readers likely do not know of each other’s identity or presence, nor do they gain anything from it. A true community requires that additional criteria be met, and evidence of community can be found in many forms. Kling and Courtwright (2003) have criticized overly general use of the term community, suggesting that a true community extends beyond mere ability to communicate with others. They highlight interpersonal elements such as a developing sense of trust among participants and the resulting willingness to take risks as indicators of community. Josefsson (2005) provides a framework of social dynamics to be explored, with community being demonstrated through the interrelationship of forms of expression,