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Virtual Community of Practice

Definition

This collaboratory is a network of individuals who share a research
area and communicate about it online. Virtual Communities may share news of
professional interest, advice, techniques, or pointers to other resources
online. Virtual Communities of Practice are different from Distributed Research
Centers in that they are not focused on actually undertaking joint projects.
The term "community of practice" is taken from Wenger and Lave
(1998).

Example

Ocean.US is an electronic meeting place for researchers studying
oceans, with a focus on U.S. coastal waters (Hesse, Sproull, Kiesler, &
Walsh, 1993). The project runs an active set of bulletin boards/email listservs
used to exchange professional information (e.g., job openings), along with some
political and scientific issues. Ocean.US also provides online workspace for
specific projects and develops online support for workshops and distance
education in this field. The project began in 1979 as ScienceNet, providing
subscription-based electronic discussions and other services before email and
Web services were widely available. ScienceNet was shut down in the mid-1990s
when the technology became ubiquitous and the project could no longer be
supported with paid subscriptions. It was re-implemented as a set of web-based
services, and renamed Ocean.US. The service is owned and run by a for-profit
company, Omnet.

Technology Issues

As with Open Community Contributions Systems, the main technology issue
is usability. Successful Communities of Practice tend to make good use of
Internet-standard technologies such as listserv, bulletin boards, and
accessible web technology. A key technology decision for these projects is
whether to emphasize asynchronous technologies such as bulletin boards, or invest
time and energy into synchronous events such as online symposia.

Communities are about shared interest.  Blogs are about individual interests.  There are enough blogs out there that there are bound to be many bloggers who share the same interests, and thus are born communities of shared interest amongst blogs.  Communities, whether blogs or otherwise, stick together because those common interests remain strong and the connections between the people engage the community members

All it comes down to is do your members have a shared interest, know and trust each other, and want to participate (a willingness because they want to, not because they are told to)

- if they do, it will be used

BUT, Critical Mass of people or Network Effects is not as essential in communities as it is in networks, from wikipedia:

“The classic example is the telephone. The more people own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner. This creates a positive externality because a user may purchase their phone without intending to create value for other users, but does so in any case.”

Community Congestion of late:

“The expression “network effect” is applied most commonly to positive network externalities as in the case of the telephone. Negative network externalities can also occur, where more users make a product less valuable, but are more commonly referred to as “congestion”