Researching Community in Distributed Environments medical conditions, cooking, and travel, and a wide variety of professions including education, research, medicine, politics, and library science. A shared hobby, lifestyle, or profession is the glue that initially binds many of these communi- ties. At first, a small group of individuals start their own blogs and find other individuals with blogs toward which they feel an affinity. These bloggers connect to each other via links and comments. Over time these small networks attract others who are initially readers but become commenters and/or bloggers themselves. This second phase of com- munity development encompasses both people who intentionally begin blogging in order to be part of the network as well as people who have long been silo-style bloggers or bloggers in other networks who later make the decision to connect into the community. Community connections in online settings, particularly distributed ones like blogs, are com- BACKGROUND AND BRIEF REVIEW OF LITERATURE The growing body of research on blogs repre- sents a variety of topics, including the traits and motivations of bloggers (Miura & Yamashita, 2007; Stefanone & Jang, 2008), identity issues (Dennen, in press; Qian & Scott, 2007), content, characteristics and taxonomic categories for blogs (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright, 2005; Lagu, Kaufman, Asch, & Armstrong, 2008), the impact of blogging on people's lives (Baker & Moore, 2008), and how blogging might be characterized within a particular country or culture (Trammell, Tarkowski, Hofmoki, & Sapp, 2006). Many, although not all, of these studies have looked at blogs and bloggers as individual units, surveying or observing them in a singular context. However, blogs are an interactive medium and often blogging is a community enhancing or community found-