The trend of the Internet - online community (I)

I have attended quite of number seminars or events organised by IT research company, University or technology vendors since 2007 till now. Basically, they gives me the same message which is the future development of the Internet. I can really say that the internet becomes part of our lives to different extent as our social networks have been building on the Internet. We shop through the Internet; share ourselves/meet friends through blog, Facebook, MSN and ...;and do not get the latest news from newspaper, radio, TV or your friends but from the SMS of your cell phone or the browser of your laptop.

Nowadays, the network infrastructures and the Internet are very well-developed and we can therefore, establish our online communities highly effective. First of all, we need to give a clear definition to "online community" and then we can continue our discussions. According to Wikipedia (2009), “Online Community” is a synonym of “virtual community”. It states,

Virtual Community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, internet social network service or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community.

It sounds very straight forward and not difficult to understand. However, when we try to understand the nature of Online Community, we would raise a few practical issues. Probably, I will further discuss this issue later. we can consider another view of VC. Ince (2004) gave an even more narrow definition of VC.

A virtual community is a web site which sells some product or service. In this respect there is no difference from an e-shop.

He also gave a perfect example to illustrate his view which is Amazon. Basically, Amazon is an online shop which allows members to submit product reviews and questions for sharing.

Blanchard & Markus (2004) only regarded the commercial interest oriented websites as "virtual settlements" and further illustrated that only those virtual settlements in which the members have develped affective bonds qualify as "virtual community".

They also indicated that a sense of community is to determine the beneficial outcomes of a community. By comparing "community” to "virtual community", the sense of virtual community (SOVC) should have the following behaviours:

• Membership, boundaries, belonging, and group symbols
• Influences, in terms of enforcing and challening norms
• Exchange of support among members
• Shared emotional connections among members

Zope is a popular open source online community which has the above behaviours. In order to gain a login to Zope, you need to register an account first. You can exchange ideas with other members and make more or less contributions to the community. Through these activities, you would have a strong sense of community. For example, "Children with diabetes" is a non-profitable online community which is a social network for supporting the kids, families and adults with diabetes.

Yahoo is another form of online community however, it has much lesser SOVC. The influences and objectives of the communities are very blur. Apparently, Yahoo is a content provider which has comprehensive services such as email, blog, dictionary, auctions, knowledge sharing, news, advertising and etc. These are more for commercial interests rather than the communities. Anyway, they can still build customer loyalty and enable the company running the web site to receive large amount of feedback on the product or service they sell.

Lewis (2008) demonstrated in his paper how human computer interaction (HCI) practitioners utilise an online community to drive commercial product innovation, definition, and development through a case study. The lead architects used the blogs and forums as the main avenues of communication to interact with users. Within two months of the community launch, there were over 200 registered users and this number were growing exponentially. There were over 2000 posts to the forum, from internal developers as well as external consumers. It shows that the particition of online community grows at a great extent is the key to the success of e-commerce.

I don't want to talk too much today.

To be continued

References

Blanchard, AL & Markus, ML 2004, 'The Experienced "Sense" of a Virtual Community: Characteristics and Processes', The DATA BASE for advances ininformation Systems - Winter 2004, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 65-79.

Ince, D. (2004), Developing distributed and e-commerce applications, 2nd edn, Harlow, Essex, UK: Addison – Wesley, p.32.

Lewis, S 2008, ‘Using online communities to drive commercial product development’, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Florence, Italy, pp. 2039-2043.

Virtanen, T & Malinen, S 2008, ‘Supporting the Sense of Locality with Online Communities’, MindTrek: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Entertainment and media in the ubiquitous era 2008, Tampere, Finland, pp. 145-149.

Wikipedia 2009, Virtual Community, last updated, 18 March, Wikimedia Foundation Inc., US, viewed 21 March 2009, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_communities>.