Recently I came across a discussion about constructing a website to serve as a resource for a community and a nexus for social interaction within that community. One of the possibilities under consideration was providing hosted blogging for community members.

It seemed likely to me that most members of a community (or social subset which could potentially form a community?) who were inclined to be blogging would already be doing so. I think as bloggers often create commentary and dialogue communities of their own, that in addition to providing a platform for new community members to blog if they wish, it could be beneficial to a fledgling community to ask established community bloggers if they would be willing to integrate their blog with the community site.

I suspect that would be a fair degree of technical challenge, since beyond merely syndicating the existing blog to the community website, I am also envisioning a unified comment thread, so that comments made at the blog's primary location would show up at the community site, and likewise comments made at that site by community members would also show up in the blog's own comment stream. At least to me that seems likely an effective balance between attempting to build local community, soliciting the contributions of established community members, and not asking people to uproot the niches they have settled themselves into.

As I said, I suspect there would be a fair amount of technical difficulty in doing such a thing, although I think previously the Bad Astronomy blog has been integrated with the Universe Today forums, so it seems possible and the increasing prevalence of OpenID might make it easier. The variety of blogging software platforms available I suspect makes the problem a lot harder, maybe entirely impractical.