I’ve seen it happen in the tech industry where various tech companies that compete with each other cooperate (EDS was reselling IBM tools). I’ve seen it in other mature industries (Joint ventures created for oil and gas exploration). But blogging?

Very much so!

The first, and most prevalent form of cooperation that I’ve seen is link sharing (particularly in blogrolls). In this case, two bloggers include links on their sites to other blogs. Obviously, if you like a blogger, you should like the blogs they like, right?

I’ve also seen guest posts. In this case, you have another blogger guest post on your blog (or you guest post on theirs). The blog gets good content and the guest blogger gets more exposure. The goal is to create some reciprocal traffic as the result.

But both of these provide very limited (typically one-on-one) results.

Now, I’ve found a new form of cooperation that has me really excited. Effectively, it is an RSS/Twitter Cooperative. The organizer has created a list in a special format that allows members of the cooperative to subscribe to each other’s RSS feeds through a simple import. As a function of the cooperative, we all agreed to assist each other in marketing to include Tweets, Stumbles, Diggs, etc. This could be big!

I’ll be monitoring the results over the coming week or so and will let you know how it is going in my monthly update.