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21 Dec 09

Twitter, Traffic, Trends And More: The 9 Coolest Social Media Maps On The Web (PICTURES)

"Maps of online communities, the proliferation of web trends, and popularity of social networks are among these terrific infographics depicting the social media landscape, which will help you visualize who's out there, what they're saying, and where they're sharing it."

www.huffingtonpost.com/...dia-graphics-the_n_398492.html - Preview

visualization online_community social_media

20 Dec 09

How to build a Facebook community | Socialbrite

"Like any social tool, Facebook needs to be worked in order to achieve specific marketing, event or fundraising goals. Yes, you need to have a an effective Facebook Page where fans can easily interact (see “11 Quick Tips to Enhance Your Facebook Fan Page” by @franswaa). And yes, you need to have compelling content.

However, even with all this, if you don’t consistently nurture your Facebook relationships, you’ll end up with visitors — potential fans — wondering, “Are they still in business?” "

www.socialbrite.org/...-levers-you-need-to-be-pulling - Preview

participation_literacy facebook online_community

17 Dec 09

10 Rules for Increasing Community Engagement

"Getting people to interact with others and upload content to a community-driven site enough may sound easy, but engagement doesn’t happen automatically. It takes time and work, and much of the right formula is deduced through trial and error.

Here are 10 tips for increasing user engagement that work for news community web sites, but can apply to all types of online user-engagement communities."

mashable.com/...community-engagement - Preview

comm217 online_community online_facilitation

Here are 10 tips for increasing user engagement that work for news community web sites, but can apply to all types of online user-engagement communities.
1. Make It Easy to Participate
9 more annotations...
- 2. Be a Leader
- 3. Interact With the Community
- 4. Welcome Newbies
- 5. Identify and Nurture Power Users
- 6. Showcase and Cross Promote UGC
- 7. Reward Contributors
- 8. Be Timely About Posting UGC
- 9. Allow Profile Creation
- 10. Engage With Popular Existing Communities

14 Dec 09

Social Networks Bring Companies Like SAP Closer to Customers | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com

SAP hosts a virtual community that includes partners, consultants, customers and even competitors in addition to SAP employees, as I found when I interviewed Mark Yolton, senior vice president of the SAP Community Network, earlier this year. Yolton told me:

We have lot of smart people at SAP, but we don’t have all of the smart people. We want to hear insights from others, especially from our customers and partners. Maybe a manufacturer in Mexico can help a chemical company in India apply some operational best practices or use their SAP software in a different way.

More than 1.6 million people from 200-plus countries and territories are members of the network. Some 5,000 are active contributors, with only about a third of them SAP employees. The community includes wikis, discussion forums, blogs and e-learning opportunities,"

www.itbusinessedge.com/...s-like-sap-closer-to-customers - Preview

online_community

11 Dec 09

Lost in the Filth Simulacrum | h+ Magazine

l

Lost in the Filth Simulacrum
Is 4chan the Future of Human Consciousness?

They say the children are our future. But if 4chan is any indication of what they have in store for us, we are in for a very rough time indeed."

hplusmagazine.com/...lost-filth-simulacrum - Preview

online_community

10 Dec 09

Social Media Volume 2: User Engagement Strategies | Snurblog

"1. Communities are defined by the adherence of their members to a set of shared values, beliefs, norms and ideas.

* Such norms develop over time, and are subject to constant renegotiation in the community.
* Evaluation against these ideals determines the place of individual members in the community.

2. Communities are organised around their leading users and ideals in concentric circles, from the core to the margins.

* The leading community members are those who best embody the community's shared ideals.
* Members may rise in status by showing their allegiance to the community's values.

3. Individual communities within a wider field of interest are themselves organised in concentric circles.

* Communities within a given field range from smaller specialist groups to generic spaces.
* These communities interact and engage with one another, and their membership overlaps.

4. Users of social media spaces may be motivated by several competing factors.

* These include egocentric (individual needs) and altruistic (community needs) motivations,
* as well as intrinsic (personal satisfaction) and extrinsic (social rewards) motivations.

5. Various combinations of these motivations result in a range of commonly observable user types.

* Knowledge sharers derive personal satisfaction from sharing with the community.
* Community facilitators aim to serve the community by safeguarding its social processes.
* Information seekers come to the community mainly to address their personal needs.
* Attention seekers feel a need to gain social status within the community.

6. Users may move through a range of stages in their social media lifecycle, but there is no one typical pathway which they follow, other than from lesser to greater sophistication of usage.

* The pathways followed by users are inherently dependent on the social media spaces they use.
* Users may be at different lifecycle stages in different social media spaces.

Part 2

In Part 2, we convert this unders

snurb.info/socialmedia-vol2 - Preview

online_community

Online Community ROI: Models and Reporting – Research Study Posted « Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

"Research is a large part of the activities that I and Forum One Networks engages in. The Online Community Research Network studies and publishes 6 times a year on topics that matter to those responsible for guiding online community and social media activities in their organization.

The Online Community ROI Models and Reporting research study was initiated in February of 2008. The study was created in order to investigate further into the ROI research that we conducted in the last half of 2007, and to gain insight into specifically how organizations were valuing and reporting on their online communities activities. Further, we wanted to gain insight into who the stakeholders were for ROI metrics, and how the reports were being received.

I will be blogging highlights of the report over the next few weeks. To obtain a full copy, as well as access to all of our other research, and the professional network of online community pros, please consider joining the Online Community Research Network.

We received approximately 150 completed surveys. Participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms."

redplasticmonkey.wordpress.com/...eporting-research-study-posted - Preview

online_community

09 Dec 09

Community Management Wiki

"We're trying to document and synthesize what we know about community management, and build a comprehensive resource for people who run all kinds of communities. Please join us! "

communitymgt.wikia.com/...Community_Management_Wiki - Preview

online_community

08 Nov 09

The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

"The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

by Robert Scoble on November 2, 2009

I’ve been doing online communities for more than 20 years, starting in 1985 when a friend had a BBS. One thing I’ve noticed over and over again is that chat rooms and forums start out fun and then devolve over time for various reasons.

But in 2000 I discovered that blogs had the opposite effect. They got more interesting over time.

Why is that?

I call it the chat room/forum problem and I think I’ve discovered the cause.

See, in a chat room no one is in control. But usually some small group starts one. They are interesting at the start. I remember when a small group of us joined Microsoft’s NetMeeting forum back in 1996. Those were the days! They were fun. Extremely so. Some of us are even still friends today and we always love to talk about the early days of that group.

Why?

Because all of us had a common interest (a new product) and we were a small group and we were at the same level at the beginning (all of us were newbies).

But it devolved.

How?

First, wave after wave of newbies came in. They all wanted their attention and you couldn’t tell the experienced users (visually) from the new ones. At first the newbie waves were a lot of fun because we were able to teach new people the tricks we had spent months learning (like how to get a certain brand of video card to work, etc)."

scobleizer.com/...lem-an-apology-to-technosailor - Preview

online_community

05 Nov 09

Predicting continuance in online communities: model development and empirical test - Behaviour & Information Technology

"Popular interest in online communities has grown rapidly in recent years as a result of the widespread diffusion of Web 2.0 applications. However, the full values and potential of online communities cannot be realised without users' ongoing participation. Thus, this study aims at developing and empirically testing a research model to examine users' continuance intention to participate in an online community based on an extended information systems (IS) continuance model. Specifically, entertainment value and affective commitment are included in the IS continuance model and empirically examined in the context of online communities. A total of 240 returns collected from an online survey, which was conducted among users of a website bulletin board-based community in China, were analysed using partial least squares. The results reveal that users' continuance intention to participate in an online community is determined by both satisfaction and affective commitment. Satisfaction and affective commitment are, in turn, influenced by positive disconfirmations of purposive and entertainment values. The findings of this study contribute not only to theory building in online community continuance but also inform online community moderators in their effort to develop strategies for retaining their users. "

www.informaworld.com/...tent~db=all~content=a916663162 - Preview

online_community

02 Nov 09

ijurr.wpd

Computer networks are social networks. Social affordances of computer supported social networks--broader bandwidth, wireless portability, globalized connectivity, personalization--are fostering the movement from door-to-door and place-to-place communities to person-to-person and role-to-role communities. People connect in social networks rather than in communal groups. In-person and computer-mediated communication are integrated in communities characterized by personalized networking.
"

www.chass.utoronto.ca/...ijurr3a1.htm - Preview

social_networks sociology online_community networks

Abstract

Computer networks
are social networks. Social affordances of computer supported social networks--broader
bandwidth, wireless portability, globalized connectivity, personalization--are
fostering the movement from door-to-door and place-to-place communities to person-to-person
and role-to-role communities. People connect in social networks rather than
in communal groups. In-person and computer-mediated communication are integrated
in communities characterized by personalized networking.
We find
community in networks, not groups. Although people often view the world in terms
of groups (Freeman 1992), they function in networks. In networked societies:
boundaries are permeable, interactions are with diverse others, connections
switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies can be flatter and recursive.
50 more annotations...
- Communities are far-flung,
  loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit, and fragmentary. Most people operate in multiple,
  thinly-connected, partial communities as they deal with networks of kin, neighbours,
  friends, workmates and organizational ties. Rather than fitting into the same
  group as those around them, each person has his/her own "personal community"
- he structure and composition of
  community networks affect people's control over their lives, and people's structural
  positions in community networks affect the kinds of resources to which they
  have access. The proliferation of personal community networks happened well
  before the development of cyberspace (Wellman and Wetherell 1996; Wellman 1999a).
  Yet the rapid emergence of computer-mediated communications means that relations
  in cyberplaces are joining with relations on the ground.
- Complex social
  networks have always existed, but recent technological developments in communication
  have afforded their emergence as a dominant form of social organization. When
  computer-mediated communication networks link people, institutions and knowledge,
  they are computer-supported social networks. The technological development of
  computer networks and the societal flourishing of social networks are now in
  a positive feedback loop.
- I define "community"
  as networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information,
  a sense of belonging, and social identity.
- I examine
  the "social affordances" of technology: The possibilities that technological
  changes afford for social relations and social structure.⁽³⁾
- The
  human use of these technologies is creating and sustaining community ties. These
  ties have transformed cyberspace into cyberplaces, as people
  connect online with kindred spirits, engage in supportive and sociable relationships
  with them, and imbue their activity online with meaning, belonging and identity.
- To be sure, these technologies
  also have negative affordances, such as interpersonal alienation, lessened privacy,
  increased surveillance, and machine-dependent vulnerability to computerized
  crime and breakdown (forecast a century ago by E.M. Forster 1909).
- "24x7", people
  get in the habit of sending email or web-surfing whenever the thought strikes
  them, glancing frequently at the incoming email box, or frequently checking
  to see who is currently available for instant messaging, that is email that
  happens in real time rather than through one-way sending and receiving (Issacs
  2000). The easily-available Internet --no need to boot up or connect--makes
  the web a convenient place to find quick information and makes email a handy
  way to share quick thoughts. It also makes it easier to work from home. Just
  as employers complain about workers' use of the Internet for personal matters,
  family members complain that their loved ones are tied to their computers during
  their supposed leisure hours
- We are moving to a world of both ubiquitous and portable
  computing
- The person--not the place, household or workgroup--will become even more
  of an autonomous communication node.
- The development of globalized portability will mean the potential availability
  of "small world" interpersonal connectivity. All will be connected to all, either
  directly or through short chains of indirect ties.
- The Internet has changed the nature of the continuing tension between centralization
  and personalization.
- "If
  you combine virtual community, collaborative filtering, and web-to-cellphone,
  you get a scenario in which you always know who in your physical vicinity at
  the moment shares certain affinities and willingness to be contacted" (Howard
  Rheingold, personal email, January 11 2000; see also Rheingold 1993, 2000).
- One transition
  was the nineteenth/twentieth century move from door-to-door to place-to-place
  community relationships. This transition was driven by revolutionary developments
  in both transportation and communication. It was a move away from a solidary
  group in a single locale to contact between people in different places and
  multiple social networks. Households became important centres for networking;
  neighbourhoods became less important.
  Another transition
  has already started: The shift away from place-based inter-household ties
  to individualized person-to-person interactions and specialized role-to-role
  interactions.
- since the Agricultural
  Revolution, community has traditionally been based in itinerant bands, agrarian
  villages, trading towns, and urban neighbourhoods. In these milieus, people
  walked to visit each other. The community was spatially compact and densely-knit
- Communities were
  bounded, so that most relationships happened within their gates rather than
  across them.
- Social class was based on control over labour power and
  resources. It was based on position within the small community and the access
  to external resources afforded by the few links to outside.
- Pastoralist nostalgia for quaint little villages leads to overlooking
  the evidence for preindustrial connectivity over long distances.
- The densely-knit interconnectivity of such communities
  made it easy to control material goods and behaviour.
  The tight boundaries that contained interactions insured that few resources--including
  knowledge--would be imported or exported. The broadly-based ties of community
  members ensured that much feasible support could be provided, but only when
  the community wanted to provide it. As there was only one network, the only
  alternative was running away--to the military, the church or merchant traders
- Although the telegraph
  was generally only used for short, high-priority messages, it was the harbinger
  of communication becoming divorced from transportation.
- If "community" is defined socially
  and not spatially, it is clear that contemporary communities rarely are limited
  to neighbourhoods. (Wellman and Leighton 1979; Wellman 1999a). This is because
  people usually obtain support, companionship, information and a sense of belonging
  from those who do not live within the same neighbourhood or even within the
  same metropolitan area. People maintain these community ties through phoning,
  writing, driving, railroading, transiting, and flying. Although characteristics
  of neighbourhoods remain important--as differential real estate values between
  neighbourhoods testify--neighbourhoods are not important sources of community.
- Living
  in networks has profound implications for the nature of place-to-place communities
  as compared with door-to-door communities:
  
  The ability
  to connect with multiple social milieus, with limited involvement in each
  milieu.
  The decreased
  control over inhabitants' behaviour that each milieu has.
  The decreased
  commitment of each milieu to its inhabitants' well-being.
  People must
  actively maintain their sparsely-knit ties and fragmented networks. By contrast,
  it is easier for people in groups to sit back and let group dynamics and densely-knit
  structures do the work. That is why friendship networks are less apt than
  kinship networks to persist in times of overload.
  The ability
  to re-establish relationships quickly with friends and relatives whom one
  has not seen in months or even years.
  A lowered proportion
  of interactions based on "ascriptive" characteristics people are born with--such
  as age, gender, race, and social class--and increased proportion based on
  "achieved" characteristics adopted through the life course -- such as lifestyles,
  shared norms, and voluntary interests.
  Fostering "cross-cutting"
  ties that link and integrate social milieus, instead of such groups being
  isolated and tightly-bounded.
  Increased choices
  in milieus in which to get involved.
  Reduced sense
  of palpable group memberships that provide a sense of belonging.
  Reduced identity
  and pressures of belonging to groups.
  Increased opportunity,
  contingency, globalization, and uncertainty through participation in social
  networks.
  Increased emphasis
  on structural position in different networks--such as brokerage ties that
  connect multiple networks--and decreased emphasis on group membership. Active
  networking is more important than going along with the group.
- Community networks now contain high proportions of people who
  enjoy each other and low proportions of people who are forced to interact with
  each other because they are juxtaposed in the same neighbourhood, kinship group,
  organization, or workplace.
  It is almost
  as easy to send a message to 10 friends as it is to contact one.
  Group aliases
  allow people to contact 100 or more friends by typing a single word.
  Email discussion
  groups and real-time chat groups provide specialized audiences--and some respondents--of
  the hundreds and thousands.
  Many online
  ties are palpable, supportive relationships. The Internet is useful both for
  maintaining strong ties of intimacy and weaker ties of acquaintanceship.
  Rather than
  being exclusively online or in-person, many community ties are complex dances
  of face-to-face encounters, scheduled meetings, two-person telephone calls,
  emails to one person or several, and broader online discussions among those
  sharing interests.
- Switching
  and maneuvering among networks, people can use ties to one network to bring
  resources to another. The very fact of their tie to another network will be
  a resource, creating the possibility of linkage, trade and cooperation.
- Moving around with a mobile phone made me almost completely
  independent of place. It was I-alone that was reachable wherever I was: at a
  house, hotel, office, freeway or mall. Place did not matter; person did. The
  person has become the portal.
- Because the connection is to the person
  and not to the place, it shifts the dynamics of connectivity from places--typically
  households or worksites--to individuals.⁽⁹⁾
- The shift to a
  personalized, wireless world affords truly personal communities that
  supply support, sociability, information, and a sense of belonging separately
  to each individual. It is the individual, and neither the household nor the
  group, that is the primary unit of connectivity.
- Rather than being embedded
  in one social network, person-to-person interactors are always switching between
  networks.
- This
  kinesthetic focus on the computer, combined with the bulkiness of the screen,
  draws computer users away from simultaneously having face-to-face contact with
  proximate others. Family members have to compete for attention, for closer-to-the-eye
  computer screens afford less scope for joint interaction than television screens.
  Telephones allow much more body movement and glances at others than does personal
  computing. I doubt that many spouses tell their mates to leave the room whenever
  the telephone rings, just as I assume that most spouses refrain from opening
  each other's snail-mail. Yet some people are miffed when their spouses read
  their email. They regard their email address and alias as parts of their personal
  identity--not to be shared lightly and to be protected in divorce settlements
  (Cohen 2000). One concern is that the Internet may be so immersive that its
  siren call turns people towards their screens and away from their husbands,
  wives and children
- People who withdraw
  inward in public space are unsettling, their behaviour signalling that their
  bodies, but not personas, are passing through.
- Mobile phone users are communicating, but their communication
  is often disassociated with the physical place which they are in. They ignore
  the public aspects of their behaviour. Their failure to relate simultaneously
  to both cyber place and physical place is what bothers others. Their awareness
  and behaviour is totally in private cyberspace even though their bodies are
  in public space.
- Can true community be found
  online--in whole or in part--as well as in homes, on the phone, in the mall,
  or on street corners? When I circulated a draft of my argument online, political
  scientist Robert Putnam responded:
  
  I think you're
  a wild-eyed optimist to think that "person-to-person" networks are "just as
  good as, if not better than" old-fashioned door-to-door (or rather faces-to-faces)
  networks. But regardless of the differences between us in temperament, you surely
  cannot think that the two sorts of networks are "essentially identical".
- Research
  shows that people interact happily and fruitfully online
- Many relationships
  do not exist only online but use online contact to fill the gaps between in-person
  meetings.
- Probably not, but the question may have an utopian assumption that if people
  were not online they would be engaged in stimulating community, household, or
  personal activities. Online relationships may be filling empty spots in people's
  lives now that they no longer can wander to the local pub or café to
  take up with their community members. Participating in online community probably
  substitutes for television watching more than for anything else (Nie and Erbring
  2000). As the networked individual substitutes for the lonely crowd, online
  relationships may be increasing the frequency and intensity of community ties,
  although at the potential cost of strained household ties.
- There already are unique
  email dynamics in community-building: the folding-in of two disconnected friends
  into the same conversation, asking personal messages of posters to online discussion
  groups, developing personal relationships in these groups, typographical conventions
  of embedding interleaved responses inside original messages, and responding
  to messages at the top of the message exchange rather than on the bottom (Baron
  2000). "Email may be richer than face-to-face among people who are distributed,
  or even between those who are nominally co-located, but on different schedules"
  (Caroline Haythornthwaite, post to the SocNet discussion list, Jan 14 2001).
  Online communication also extends the reach of networks: allowing more ties
  to be maintained and fostering specialized relationships in networks.
- With respect to history, tracing memory in aging
  online archives may be easier.
- most people communicate
  with their friends, relatives, neighbours and workmates by any means available
  and necessary, online and offline. The stronger the tie, the more media used
- Private contact with familiar
  friends and relatives is replacing public gregariousness so that people pass
  each other unsmiling on streets and highways. Such privatization may be responsible
  for the lack of informal help given to strangers who are in trouble in public
  spaces (Latané and Darley 1976). It may also explain the paradox of well-connected
  people feeling lonely because of the lack of physically-present community members.
- Low levels
  of communication and electrical infrastructure, marked geographical variations
  in what infrastructure does exist and uneven distributions of wealth mean that
  any kind of telephone connection is currently rare in large areas of the impoverished
  "fourth world". Four out of five people in the world do not have access to a
  wired phone; nine out of ten do not have access to a wireless device (Khanna
  2001). Telephone density is less than two lines per 1,000 persons in Africa
  and 48 per 1,000 in Asia as compared to 520 per 1,000 in high-income countries
  (Marcelle 1998: Darkwa and Mazibulo 2000). These "switched-off region[s] of
  the world" are in a state of "technological apartheid at the dawn of the Information
  Age" (Castells 1998: 93-94).
  
  The good news
  is that the cost of computing is becoming so low that in the developed world,
  the digital social class divide should get smaller just as the digital gender
  gap has. Even in the less-developed world, the growth of wireless computing
  has made affluent residents less dependent on the national communications infrastructure.
  The bad news is that schools do not formally teach networking skills.
- When one's strong ties are unable to provide information, one is likely to find
  it from weak ties.
- This focus
  on shared interests rather than on similar characteristics can be empowering
  for members of lower-status and disenfranchised groups.
- The proliferation
  of computer-supported specialized ties provide a basis for interest-based structures
  that provide support, partial solidarity, and vehicles for aggregating and articulating
  interests. This would be an Internet cum Tocquevillean substitute for
  the decline of organized groups that Robert Putnam (2000) has identified as
  a key problem in America. Even in the pre-Internet France of the early 1990s,
  friendship and intimacy differentially linked occupational groups. Sales workers
  and executives were rarely connected, but clerks and blue-collar workers were
  (Ferrand, Mounier and Degenne 1999).
- Such specialized
  communities, based on shared interests, can foster cognitive homogeneity. Despite
  the Internet's potential to connect diverse cultures and ideas, people are drawn
  to online communities that link them with others sharing common interests or
  concerns. They may be more diversified than "real life" community in their gender,
  ethnicity and socioeconomic status, but they still communicate about only a
  limited set of topics and ideas.
  
  Where person-to-person
  community is individualizing, role-to-role community deconstructs a holistic
  individual identity. A person becomes only the sum of her roles, and there is
  the danger of alienation. The compartmentalization of personal life--within
  the household and within the community--may create an insecure milieu where
  no one fully knows anyone
- Many interpersonal ties are based only on the specialized
  roles that people play--not the whole persons. These relationships are between
  fragments of selves, rather than between whole selves. Such role-to-role relationships
  have already become abundant in place-to-place community. Most ties are specialized,
  with different community members supplying emotional support, information, material
  aid, social identity and a sense of belonging (Wellman and Wortley 1990; see
  also Fischer 1982). People must maintain differentiated portfolios of ties to
  obtain a variety of needed and wanted resources.
- Specialization means that the emotional supporters will
  not have to worry about material need, and perhaps will not even know about
  it. This will lead to lessened loads and pleasures of caring.
- Atoms--things--as
  well as bits--computer-mediated communication--connect us. Spaces continue to
  be places, where in-person meetings or passive observations provide a tangible
  sense of personal identity, a feeling of community, readily-available support
  in the form of goods and services, and a literally concrete sense of the past
  and a future (Casey 1997; Orum and Chen 2002). Physical space continues to contain
  and shape interactions, providing opportunities and constraints.
- Role-to-role community networks consist of either
  like-minded people--such as BMW 2002 fanciers--or of people with complementary
  roles--such as violinists and cellists, sadists and masochists. While such communities
  are abundant now, they are flourishing on the Internet and will become even
  more abundant as the Internet's capabilities develop.
- Although physical
  place continues to be important, cyber space has become cyber place, affecting
  the ways in which people find and maintain community.
  
  In the short
  term, it has made the household more important, as a base from which to operate
  one's computer-supported social network. This can lead to a rise in neighbouring,
  as home-based people take more interest in their immediate surroundings and
  use the Internet to neighbour without physical intrusion and to arrange visits
  (Hampton and Wellman 1999).
  Jointly with
  the mobile phone, it is emphasizing the ascendancy of person-to-person community,
  contributing (along with other factors) to the de-emphasis of domestic relations.
  It has emphasized
  individual autonomy and agency. Each person is the operator of his/her personal
  community network (see also Wellman 1999a).
  It has afforded
  greater involvement in communities of shared interest. Such communities have
  probably become more spatially dispersed.
  It has afforded
  greater connectivity between communities. The ease of communication to a large
  number of people facilitates ties that cut across group boundaries.
  Online relationships
  and online communities have developed their own strength and dynamics. Participants
  in online groups have strong interpersonal feelings of belonging, being wanted,
  obtaining important resources, and having a shared identity. They are truly
  in cyberplaces, and not just cyberspaces (Rheingold 1993, 2000; Wellman and
  Gulia 1999).
  Often, the cyberspace-physical
  space comparison is a false dichotomy. Many ties operate in both cyberspace
  and physical space, used whatever means of communication is convenient and
  appropriate at the moment.
  It has increased
  the importance of network capital in the fund of desirable resources, along
  with financial capital, human capital and cultural capital. Such network capital
  is variegated. It consists of knowing how to maintain a networked computer,
  search for information on the Internet and use the knowledge gained, create
  and sustain online relationships, and use these relationships to obtain needed
  resources, including indirect links to friends of friends.
- 3.
  "Affordances" is a term widely used in the study of human computer interaction
  (Norman 1999). Erin Bradner (2000) writing for computer scientists, has coined
  the term "social affordances" to emphasize the social as well as individual
  implications of the technological features of computer-supported communication
  networks and human-computer interfaces. See also Gaver (1996).

23 Oct 09

Why Companies shouldn’t build Online Communities.. « The Complete Innovator

"I find that many, maybe even most, companies approach social media, and other online community projects – with very little, if any, forethought on how value will be achieved as a result of jumping on this particular bandwagon.

They seem to share a belief that value will just “be created” by the mere existence of a new online channel; that innovation will simply appear if you provide a new collaborative tool; that competitive advantage will be retained through the “ownership” of a new networking group. Yet that’s rarely ever the case.

field-dreamsUnlike in the movie “Field of Dreams” – you can build it – but “they” rarely come spontaneously – or if they do, they may well end up playing a jovial game of scrabble rather than a vintage MLB baseball game on the back lawn."

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online_community

12 Oct 09

Can You Hear Me Now? - Forbes.com

tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.

Here I offer five troubles that try my tethered soul.

www.forbes.com/...176.html - Preview

technology online_community attention multitasking

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected--or more alienated
I have traveled 36 hours to a conference on robotic technology in central Japan. The grand ballroom is Wi-Fi enabled, and the speaker is using the Web for his presentation. Laptops are open, fingers are flying. But the audience is not listening. Most seem to be doing their e-mail, downloading files, surfing the Web or looking for a cartoon to illustrate an upcoming presentation. Every once in a while audience members give the speaker some attention, lowering their laptop screens in a kind of digital curtsy.
In the hallway outside the plenary session attendees are on their phones or using laptops and pdas to check their e-mail. Clusters of people chat with each other, making dinner plans, "networking" in that old sense of the term--the sense that implies sharing a meal. But at this conference it is clear that what people mostly want from public space is to be alone with their personal networks. It is good to come together physically, but it is more important to stay tethered to the people who define one's virtual identity, the identity that counts. I think of how Freud believed in the power of communities to control and subvert us, and a psychoanalytic pun comes to mind: "virtuality and its discontents."
13 more annotations...
- Some say they are making better use of their "downtime," but they argue their point without conviction. This waiting time and going-to-the-airport time was never downtime; it was work time. It was precious time when far-flung global teams solidified relationships and refined ideas.
- But tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.
- There is a new state of the self, itself
- Since the late 1990s social computing has offered an opportunity to experiment with a virtual second self. Now this metaphor doesn't go far enough. Our new online intimacies create a world in which it makes sense to speak of a new state of the self, itself. "I am on my cell … online … instant messaging … on the Web"--these phrases suggest a new placement of the subject, wired into society through technology.
- We live a contradiction: Insisting that our world is increasingly complex, we nevertheless have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted. We are primed to receive a quick message to which we are expected to give a rapid response. Children growing up with this may never know another way. Their experience raises a question for us all: Are we leaving enough time to take our time on the things that matter?
- Think of the BlackBerry user watching the BlackBerry movie of his life as someone watching a movie that takes on a life of its own. People become alienated from their own experience and anxious about watching a version of their lives scrolling along faster than they can handle. They are not able to keep up with the unedited version of their lives, but they are responsible for it.
- We are learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices. To put it most starkly: To make more time means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture. But this is not a simple proposition, since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and increasingly feel like extensions of our minds.
- We communicate with instant messages, "check-in" cell calls and emoticons. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not intended to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. (Technological determinism has its place here: Cell calls get poor reception, are easily dropped and are optimized for texting.) The culture that grows up around the cell phone is a communications culture, but it is not necessarily a culture of self-reflection--which depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, sometimes electing to share it with another person, thinking about it differently over time.
- We have become virtuosos of self-presentation, accustomed to living our lives in public. The idea that "we're all being observed all the time anyway, so who needs privacy?" has become a commonplace. Put another way, people say, "As long as I'm not doing anything wrong, who cares who's watching me?" This state of mind leaves us vulnerable to political abuse.
- Since each prisoner (citizen) knows that the guard might be looking at him or her at any moment, the question of whether the guard is actually looking--or if there is a guard at all--ceases to matter. The structure itself has created its disciplined citizen. By analogy, said my conversation partner at the cocktail hour, on the Internet someone might always be watching; it doesn't matter if from time to time someone is. Foucault's discussion of the panopticon had been a critical take on disciplinary society. Here it had become a justification for the U.S. government to spy on its citizens. All around me there were nods of assent.
- Contemporary professional life is rich in examples of people ignoring those they are meeting with to give priority to online others whom they consider a more relevant audience.
- "Being put on pause" is how one of my students describes the feeling of walking down the street with a friend who has just taken a call on his cell.
- The answer does not depend on what computers can do today or what they are likely to be able to do in the future. It hangs on the question of what we will be like, what kind of people we are becoming as we develop very intimate relationships with our machines.

09 Oct 09

BBC - Digital Revolution Blog: Rushes Sequences - Howard Rheingold interview - USA (Video)

Video: Howard Rheingold is a writer, teacher and commentator on modern communications technologies, such as the web, and originator of the term 'virtual community'.

This is a sequence from Digital Revolution presenter Aleks Krotoski's interview with Howard as part of programme one's filming in the USA.

www.bbc.co.uk/...title.shtml - Preview

rheingold video online_community social_media community

20 Sep 09

Online Database of Social Media Policies

82 different organization's policies and guidelines

socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php - Preview

online_community online_facilitation social_media

27 Aug 09

Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities

Welcome to our website and blog: it complements our book, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for community. Get in touch with us, find out more about the book, about us authors, and get excerpts and additional material that complement the book. You can buy the book here.

technologyforcommunities.com/ - Preview

online_community

21 Aug 09

Flavorwire » Blog Archive » What We Learned Watching Kids With Homemade Flamethrowers

The premise is simple; to showcase kids and their homemade flamethrowers. However, the concept behind the premise isn’t as cut and dry. Not just a music video, the ode to flamethrowers and the kids who make them is also the focal point of a case study being conducted by the Web Ecology Project, Tim Hwang of ROFLCon/Awesome Foundation and Sawyer Carter Jacobs, bassist for Family Portrait. Together the research team, which formed while working together at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, are using the video to highlight the “often overlooked universe of micro-communities flourishing in the nooks and crannies of the web.”

Through examining the tools and motivations that drive the existence of micro-groups, the project, dubbed “What we Learned Watching Kids with Homemade Flamethrowers,” will not only study the tools used by such bizarrely niche groups in order to communicate and build a virtual micro-community, but also the history of such groups, the motivation behind their actions and what said groups teach us about the current state of online culture, and society as a whole. The Internet enthusiasts hope to present their academic findings at SXSW in March.

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online_community

19 Aug 09

Online Communities Can Provide THE Most Authentic Bonding « Verbatim

Online communities are not virtual. They don’t exist only in the bits and bytes on the series of pipes known as the interwebs. To the contrary, I have found, in the 26-years that I have been online, that the relationships and bonds that people form online are not only real but in many cases are more authentic because they’re chosen by each member ra

blog.communispace.com/...ide-the-most-authentic-bonding - Preview

online_community

10 Aug 09

Communities vs. Cliques, Scenes & Cults

Community is one of the most heavily used buzzwords in social media. The traditional dictionary lists multiple definitions… and colloquially it can mean very different things to different people. Groups that some people call an “amazing community” strike me as more of a clique or even a cult. Here’s my own personal taxonomy of terms for social groups:

socialmediarockstar.com/nities-vs-cliques-scenes-cults - Preview

community online_community social_media

29 Jul 09

Online Community Building Strategy: Good Advice From Nancy White

Building an online community is in my opinion the best investment you can make toward guaranteeing yourself greater influence, authority and opportunity for business. But how easy is it to build a thriving online community?

www.masternewmedia.org/y-good-advice-from-nancy-white - Preview

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