What's Special About BUMPzee? A Platform For Your Blog Community.

Scott Jangro has created something special over at BUMPzee. While BUMPzee offers all of the things you would expect in a blogging community, it goes a step further and offers something more.

A Community Platform

BUMPzee is actually a platform used to create separate, yet tenuously connected blog communities. What this means to you is that you have an opportunity to join blog communities focused on particular topics, and even more, to create your own topic centered blogging community. While these communities are separate, and targeted, they have tenuous connections to the other communities as well through their members who can belong to multiple communities, their blogs which can belong to multiple communities and through the main discussion area which ties them all together in a free for all, specialized "comment type" forum.

This means that while your communities are focused on the topics you are interested in, there is also exposure to other, potentially related communities through an available, but not intrusive connectivity.

Any member of BUMPzee is free to join, read and discuss in any community on the site. And to submit their blogs to these communities, though the community owner has the right to accept or reject blogs based on the requirements they establish when they create their community.

A Community For You

Here's where it really gets special. Any member of BUMPzee is welcome to create a their own community within the framework to associate with bloggers who are focused on a specific topic, or even based on other criteria such as using a certain blogging platform, or belonging to a certain culture.

When you establish a community, you can set the requirements for blogs submitted to your community. You can make these requirements as strict or as lose as you feel will best serve your community.

I currently have two communities there. The first is a WordPress Designer's Community and the second is a Niche Marketing Community.

Currently The WordPress Designer's community is very small with just 6 blogs and 13 members. But it is very focused on people interested in WordPress Design, and I require that blogs be primarily about designing for WordPress in one way or another, and I further require that they have a BUMPzee widget on their blog to help promote BUMPzee.

By contrast the Niche Marketing Community is the tenth largest on the site with 49 blogs and 138 members. I do not require a BUMPzee widget on these blogs and only require that they have something to do with Niche marketing. This allows for faster and larger growth of the community, but obviously sacrifices some focus.

When you start a community of your own, you can set these requirements on your own as you think is best.

Discussion Centered Navigation

Many new members comment that they find the navigation of the site to be difficult at first. This is in large part owing to the fact that BUMPzee is a community platform, not just a community, and that the navigation is dually focused on discussions and communities. Once you realize this focus it becomes easier to find your way around.

This focus on the discussions is part of why I like BUMPzee as much as I do.

The discussions can take three main forms.

• BUMPzee Local Discussions are discussion that are begun, and take place entirely on BUMPzee. Any Bz member can post a discussion thread to any community they belong to. other members can then reply to them in a discussion format that is somewhere between a forum post, and a blog comment post.
• Post Bump Discussions are discussion that are begun by "bumping" a blog post. When you bump a blog post from the members blog, you create a discussion about the post, that actually takes place on BUMPzee. Other members can then join in on the discussion from right there.
• Blog Comment Discussions are discussions that take place on the member's blog, but if they have a BUMPzee plugin enabled on their site, it will report to BUMPzee each time a comment is added to the blog. members can then click through to the blog and take part in the discussion there on the blog.

Making It Better

Now, all of this is great to be sure. But like anything, there's always something you wish was a little different or a little more, and BUMPzee is no exception. There are two main things I would like to see happen at BUMPzee. The first is entirely in the hands of the development team, and the second is completely in the hands of the members.

First I would live to see the filtering matured and in play. Scott has already addressed this and we should see this take place in the fall. Improving the filtering would allow more blogs to take part in given communities by selectively including or excluding posts from being included in the community discussion area based on content filters. This means that a blog that is 10% about Niche marketing could add those 10% posts to the Niche Marketing community Discussion list without also adding the 40% SEO posts, or the 30% MLM posts.

Second, quite simply the discussion areas for the first two kinds of discussions are very slow. Partly this is because as blog communities go BUMPzee is not exactly the largest, and secondly, I believe, a lot of members simply concentrate on the Blog Comment Discussions. This is unfortunate. Discussions taking place on BUMPzee, either as pure Bz discussions or as Post Bump Discussion have a lot of potential to expose members and their blogs to wider circles of readership.

Many of my most frequent readers and commenters have come directly from these BUMPzee based discussions, and I have found a number of great blogs I would have otherwise missed through them.

So if you are a BUMPzee member, let this serve as a challenge to you. Lets get posting, and lets let others know about BUMPzee so we have more people posting. Lets set those discussion areas on fire. In fact if you feel like commenting on this post, I encourage you to do it at BUMPzee and not here in the blog comments. When was the last time a blogger asked you not to use the comment form?

BUMPzee Reviews Elsewhere

• Bumpzee Adds Amazing Feature - Autotagging
• 5 Reasons Why BumpZee Will Be The Next Digg, But Even Bigger
• BUMPzee looks like it might just be one of the best social networking sites for Bloggers!
• BUMPzee is an excellent way to promote your blog.
• Three Top Reasons Why I Love BumpZee: Networking, Learning and Google Juice.