Community blogging is nothing new… at least not when compared with the timescale of the existence of the “blogoshphere”. But its potential has yet to be fully tapped.

“Community Blogging” means different things to different people. Some are concerned with the natural emergence of communities in a sea of otherwise discrete and disparate blogs. The proliferation of bookmarking and social networking sites are testament to this phenomenon. Others see community blogs as location-based groupings of people. Witness the rise of the “ists”.

However, it is a third, more expansive definition that interests me the most: leveraging an existing online community to create a blogging platform with an instant audience. Done properly, the two halves should augment the whole, with the blogs and the community trading dividends.

Discussion forums were among the first uses of the Internet - with bulletin boards, newsgroups and mailing lists, known as “Usenet”, in existence since 1979.

Nowadays, pretty much anyone who has fired up a Web browser has had experience with online forums — either as participants or as “lurkers” tagging along for the ride. Despite their many flaws, community forums genuinely augment the Web positively. Whatever your passion - from hobbies such as stamp collecting, fish-keeping, scrapbooking, parachuting, or world travel, to shared interests or beliefs, such as religion, politics, hollywood stars, the tech industry or even sexual preferences, you’re certain to be able to find a number of community forums to sustain, share and expand your passion with like-minded people. Often, with tens of thousands of people from all over the world. More likely than not you will have several, if not hundreds, of forums to choose between.

phpBB has very much been at the centre of the rise of the popularity of forums. According to Google Trends, phpBB is still by far the most-searched-for forum software available. Being free, open source, full of features and relatively easy to install, it has provided “the masses” with the tool to form communities. phpBB2 is certainly rather long in the tooth, and has its own share of problems — not least in terms of floods of spammers, and a proliferation of rather outdated templates — but interest is at an all-time high with the promising phpBB3 Olympus just around the corner.

These communities provide an excellent platform for blogs. Community members keen to present their knowledge will appreciate the opportunity to present their ideas in a more personal and formal format. Blogs will provide them with the means to build their profile within the community and beyond, and cement their thoughts and ideas (hopefully) without the accompanying flame wars and rigid posting rules. The blogs they create will be somewhat removed from the “long tail” of the blogosphere — thousands of individuals out there straining to be heard — as they will have the credibility and instant profile of an established community behind them. If a single blogger isn’t prolific enough to maintain a following, a community of bloggers certainly will be. And “early days” are easy - bloggers will find they already have an avid audience, the community providing the very raison d’etre for the blog.

This runs counter to my first take on the definition of “community blogging”, above, where blogs are often the sole focal point of the community.

Benefits run both ways — while the community works for the blogs , the blogs repay the community handsomely, providing new vectors for recruiting community members, and crystallising and packaging a community’s accumulated knowledge in a much more accessible and user-friendly way. And what better way to do this than with WordPress - certainly the most popular blogging software out there at the moment (again, according to Google Trends, anyway)?

This is why I hope WP-United will become successful. For the community blogging vision to really work, I believe it makes a great deal of sense to mate the most successful blogging tool with the most successful forum. Designed to integrate WordPress into an existing phpBB site, WP-United should genuinely augment communities as well as the blogosphere.

Now, I just have to get the darn thing out of Beta…!