There is wide agreement among aficionados and researchers of blogs that blogs are indeed both part of community and community building. The previous pages of this presentation mention various ways that blogging software provides the mechanism for community building. As Hourihan writes, we bloggers share common tools and a common format. This commonality is the backbone of the oft-cited community of bloggers.

This community fits nicely with Lin's understanding of social capital, in which "individuals engage in interactions and networking in order to produce profits." Profits in this regard are the relationships with readers of a blog, and the knowledge capital that interaction produces.

Lin also distills social capital theories to four elements: information, influence, social credentials and reinforcement. As we've seen, all four of these elements are created, nurtured and exchanged through a blog - information by the blog post; influence by the links within a post; social credentials by the links to a blog; and reinforcement by the comments given by a blog's readers.

"[E]verything you do online creates your reputation, and this reputation is defined only by the words you publish," writes Blood. (129)

Reputation figures prominently in Lin's theory of social capital (Lin, chaper 9). The popularity of a blog is directly tied to its reputation, or how the author acknowledges and credits others - by links - and how the network around that blog is able to relay and spread recognition - how many readers that blog has and how many other blogs link to it. (Lin, 152)

Lin argues that, while cybernetworks equalize power, the Internet may soon see power consolidated by "resourceful actors" (read corporations). (Lin, 228) The rise of personal publishing, through software such as Movable Type, for example, seems at odds with Lin's prediction. He also, though, raises a number of unanswered questions about the future of cybernetworks and how social capital will function in those.

Blogging appears to be a fertile area of online community. I hope so, as I, like so many others, have invested much time and effort in creating community around my blog.

I'll end with a story:

At a recent wedding of my wife's sister, my brother-in-law, Tim, took me aside. He told me that he'd Googled (searched on Google) his daughter's name, Teagan, a unique spelling of a Gaelic word. The top result for that search was a link to a post on Zuiker Chronicles Online, in which I announced the birth of little Teagan. He was, he told me, very surprised, and he surfed throughout my site.

"Let's create a Shaughnessy Family website like Zuiker Chronicles Online," he said. Within a week, I'd helped accomplish that. The result is ShaughnessyFamily.net.

The online community of movabletype.org facilitated the online community of Zuiker Chronicles Online, which in turn propagated the online community of ShaughnessyFamily.net.

This is, I believe, a wonderful example of an embedded resource being shared online, and as a result creating social capital.