By Ellyssa Kroski

Times have changed. The Web has too. What was once considered an ancillary feature of Internet websites has suddenly become the raison d’être. Community is the new consumption. With the emergence of new Web 2.0 tools, the non-technical person has been given a major voice online. In today’s online environment all users, regardless of programming knowledge, have been empowered and given a sense of value.

Online community has evolved well beyond the message board and the listserv and is hastily becoming an integral part of our everyday lives. We are seeing a natural progression which began with the original static content delivery site. We moved onward to the interactive website which allowed communication between the site and the individual in a limited fashion through tools such as message boards. And we have arrived at the community site which fosters group interactivity. (26)

Community-based websites are the fastest growing sites on the Internet. The teen social ecosystem MySpace is the fourth highest trafficked website on the Internet today. Its 65 million users see 270,000 new members sign up daily. Facebook, the academic social networking site which launched in 2004 now boasts 7 million users and over 2,100 member colleges and universities. (28) The social website TagWorld which was inaugurated in November 2005 already lays claim to over 1.3 million registered users.

The blogging phenomenon continues to thrive with over 27 million blogs online today. The size of the blogosphere doubles every 5 ½ months. A new blog is created every second of every day and 13.7 million of these new bloggers are still posting after 3 months. (38)

Internet users are not solely consuming information anymore. They are reviewing films, recommending books, publishing journals, sharing files, bookmarking favorites, geotagging locations. They are developing identities on MySpace, uniting for social change on Katrinalist and Democracy 2.0, networking for business through LinkedIn, and gathering in prayer on BeliefNet. They are also inspiring, advising, inviting, dating, playing, reading, gaming, and collaborating. They are taking part in and giving life to virtual communities while at the same time meeting their own personal objectives.

Community 2.0 is about user-generated content and collaboration. It is a “contribution culture”. It is all the more prevalent because our community now comes with us through our handhelds, our phones, our laptops. It is mobile, it is ubiquitous, and it is continuous computing. “Community is the new king” (2)

Types of Community

There are several different types of web-based communities that have emerged online.

Communities of Interest: These communities evolve and revolve around shared interests such as music, videos, or other subject matter. These are the Myspace, YouTube, and TagWorld sites-types. Users exchange, produce, and consume information as well as share a public space with like-minded members.

Communities of Practice: This community type shares and produces knowledge and information within a professional network. The social site LinkedIn as well as the community of librarian blogs known as the biblioblogosphere would both be considered communities of practice.

Goal-Oriented Communities of Interest: When users share a tangible goal as well as an area of interest, they gather in a goal-oriented community of interest. The best example of this would be the Wikipedia.

Learner’s Communities: These communities encompass those who share a similar educational goal. They are the often-times private networks of students enrolled in particular classes. These could include course management sites, message boards or new Web 2.0 elearning sites such as Nuuvo or Instructables. (39)

Community in Practice

What is online community all about? What are users doing in these communities?

Blogging: A blog, or weblog, is an online journal or website on which articles are posted and displayed in chronological order. Their content most often centers around a particular subject or theme. Blogs are the new “home page”. A vast and distributed community of these web-based journals has evolved which has come to be known as the blogosphere. Users are blogging about everything from gadgets to their favorite American Idol contestant. They are blogging professional conferences live from their laptops, they are shedding light on scandals, and they are blogging their life stories. Blogging has become so prevalent that traditional publications have begun to offer editorial blogs for their readers’ perusal. Organizations and corporations are beginning to understand that blogging adds a human dimension to their otherwise impersonal institutions. Networks of blogs have emerged as subset communities within the blogosphere. In these blog corrals users gather to blog about similar subject matter.

Wikis: A wiki is a collaborative online space in which many users can work together on a shared project. Everyone can contribute by adding to the wiki, making changes, and deleting items quickly and easily. Wikis are very useful for gathering information and resources around a niche topic. They can be made into reference tools such as an encyclopedia or and FAQ. Wikis may also serve as an Intranet.

User Ratings: Users today are empowered to rate items such as articles, recipes, books, movies, suggestions, and much more. The community is now the judge of quality. On some community-based sites, users may even rate other people.

User Reviews: Users are not just reading evaluations of products and media anymore, but are writing reviews themselves. The community is no longer turning to the “experts” to tell them what to buy, wear, watch and eat, but are asking one another. On many community sites, users can write in-depth analyses of products and services. This user-produced content harnesses the collective intelligence in true Web 2.0 fashion which allows users to both participate and to serve as a filter for what is valuable. As a byproduct of allowing the community to create original content, these sites gain a resource with a unique value.

P2P File Sharing: Peer-to-peer file sharing technologies such as bittorrent utilize the network effect to power transfer rates among users. Users share files such as music, movies, games and software through such community based file-sharing systems. Download speeds increase as does the number of users for each file. Users simultaneously share and upload the portion of the file which they have already downloaded as they continue to receive the remainder.

Content Sharing: Users are not only sharing their files, but their personalities, hobbies, photos, home videos, bookmarks, and wish lists. The lifetime goals listmaking site 43 Things has topped 176,000 registered users. Flickr boasts over 2 million members and 100 million images. Over 15 million videos are viewed daily on YouTube. (26) Internet users are making themselves known and they are joining with others like themselves to share their thoughts, goals, recipes, and even what they’re consuming. Provided with new Web 2.0 tools, users are not only sharing new content, but creating it themselves.

User Comments: Readers in this Web era are invited to take part in a dialogue as opposed to their previously passive role. They have been given the ability to respond to content of all types. Users leave comments on blog postings, including those on mainstream media sites, photos on Flickr, and profiles on social networking sites such as Myspace. In addition to empowering the user, today’s Web allows content authors to address thoughts and feedback from their readership directly. It provides for a community conversation.

Trackbacks: A trackback is unique to a blog post. It is a referral from another blog post or article which has cited it in their work. They are a way to gauge influence of a particular blog post within the blogosphere, similar to noting the authority held by a frequently cited print source.

Blogrolls: A blogroll is a list of other blogs usually displayed on the sidebar of a weblog. They are the blogs which are endorsed and recommended by that blogger. Blogrolls are a measure of popularity in the blogosphere.

User Profiles: Web 2.0 personalization features give users the ability to create and gain a sense of online identity by developing user profiles. These profiles are reflective of the user’s personality, hobbies, and interests and are used as references for users to connect and interact online.

Most Popular Lists: These community lists offer a glimpse into the zeitgeist for a particular user base. Top lists point to the content considered the most interesting, popular, and highest valued by a given community. Types of top lists include the top emailed articles, most blogged about stories, most commented posts, top read stories, and most reviewed books.

Tagging: A way for users to attach meaningful keywords to content, tagging allows users to classify and categorize their own digital collections. The use of tags has been incorporated into the functionality of most community and social sites such as on del.icio.us to describe bookmarks, on Flickr for categorizing photos, on YouTube to classify videos, and many more. Most blogging software allows tagging to organize and describe blog posts. Since January 2005 there have been over 81 million blog posts with tags attached to them, a number which is increasing by 400,000 daily. (38) The combination of these tags within a community develops into a folksonomy, a naturally occurring classification scheme.

Open Source Software: The Open Source Software movement is not new to Web 2.0, but rather remains a vital web-based community. Open source software is that which freely provides its source code for others to edit, refine, redevelop and improve. These applications most often have software licenses which give users rights to modify and redistribute the software with the condition that they in turn share their source code. According to Forrester Research, 56% of US firms and 39% of European companies use open source software. (7)

Podcasting: A term used to describe an audio blog, a podcast is an audio file or a series of them which can be listened to via a portable device such as an iPod or mp3 player as well as a computer. A podcast is often distributed by an RSS feed which transmits the most current episode. Podcasting technology has enabled the ordinary person to create their own talk shows instead of just consuming them. Since their popularization in late 2004, a dynamic community of these “radio” bloggers has amassed. There are currently over 20,000 podcasts now available online and according to Bridge Ratings, approximately 4.8 million Americans listened to a podcast last year. (16)

Vlogging: The video blog is the latest development in the amateur media production sphere. These episodes are also distributed via RSS and are sometimes referred to as video podcasts. Many vlogs allow users to tag and leave comments in response to episodes similar to replying to a post on a blog. A small but growing community, vloggers have moved further into the mainstream with the October 2005 release of Apple’s 5GB iPod which supports video files. The videolog directory MeFeedia offers feeds for over 6,500 video blogs. (8)

IM/Chat: Instant messaging involves communicating with another person over the Internet in real time through the use of a client software. AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and others have been around for some time and are still going strong with 53 million and 29 million active users respectively. (4) With Web 2.0 tools such as Meebo, an IM aggregator, users can sign on to all of the major instant messaging services simultaneously. Many of today’s IM clients offer group chat functionality.

Internet Forums: One of the original online community vehicles, the Internet forum or message board continues to host relevant discussions. Many sizeable websites feature forum as a place where users can confer about site content, subject matter, or just plain anything.

Mobile Communities: Advances in cell phone and mobile technology are suddenly allowing us to be “wired in” regardless of where we are or what we’re doing. The Internet is no longer limited to the desktop, but can now fit in our pocket. We can browse the Web, read our blogs, and check our email. Location-based social software for the cell phone such as dodgeball lets users connect with friends and friends of friends with the precision of a ten block radius.

It’s more than Just Tools…

Community 2.0 is about more than just tools. It’s about empowering the user. It is a time to embrace the amateur alongside the professional, because the consumer is now also the creator. Community 2.0 is about designing for interoperability and providing content for intermixability. Today’s users are combining many content types including text, music, video, etc. to create new resources. Successful community builders know that they can attract users by providing raw materials for such creative activity. (20)

Community today is about everyone becoming a user. Popular online social communities such as MySpace and Flickr are taking part in embedded observation in order to affect better software development. By “living with the natives” they are able to respond in a natural way to both user and system needs. (12)

Community 2.0 means the end of walled gardens. It’s about building trust with users through quality, consistency, and the abdication of power. It’s about letting go of the fear of becoming obsolete and simply adapting and adopting a new strategy.

Today’s web community utilizes the network effect, but delicately balances the need to populate the environment with providing a space comfortable enough to encourage conversation. A place where users can randomly connect with one another because of shared interests or acquaintances. (12)

Community 2.0 fosters sharing, collaboration, and consumer-created content. It promotes group conversation and input. Community 2.0 is an organic, bottom-up phenomenon enabling users to author their own environments.

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