"Blog" is short for the longer term "weblog" and a word that refers to a kind of online diary for an individual or organization. A blog usually has a specific focus and includes posts about specific types of events or issues. A blogging community is a group of people who write about similar things or use the same blogging platform. The collective blogging community of all blogs on the web is often referred to as the "blogosphere".
A blog community can be connected in several ways. A group of blogs might just be connected because they use the same blogging software. In addition, the blogging community often meets around a particular topic. There are hundreds of blogs, for example, dedicated to poetry. The people who run these blogs are poetry publishers, literary scholars who focus their research on poetry, and poets themselves. Since all of these blogs have a similar theme, they will be considered part of the poetry blogging community.
Sometimes a blog will have more than one focus. There might be a blog for a publisher who specializes in publishing both poetry and short story collections. Such a publisher will write posts related to both poetry and fiction. In that sense, the blog will belong to both the poetry blog community and the short story community. Blogs quite often fall into a number of categories in terms of their content and the topics they cover. Therefore, it also falls into a number of communities.
There are several directories that categorize blogs on the Internet. It is these directories and search engines that unite blog communities in their registers. This kind of formal grouping of communities can be helpful to people at the very beginning of a research project.
A more organic way to find community blogs is to look at the links section of the blog. The links section, sometimes referred to as the "blog list", will display links to other blogs that the blog owner likes or visits regularly. This gives a clearer picture of which blogs have become connected to each other in their blogosphere community.