a good news for Web site builders who need to create community collaboration sites.

According to the news from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2070726,00.asp?kc=EWITAEMNL121106EOAD Wikipeida founder announced that Wikia, Inc. was ready to give away all softwares that were used by web designers. "Wikia gives away the tools and the revenue to its users. It requires only that sites built with the company's resources link to Wikia.com, which makes money through advertising."

An interesting survey to measure the online community performance

By visiting that site http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/uploads/metrics.pdf, You can find an example for a survey prepared for measuring an online community performance.

From Amy Jo Kim

I'd like to present a short interview passages from Amy Jo Kim who is an online community architect. You can find whole article from http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communitywhatwhy.htm
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Amy Jo Kim, online community architect, has suggested that there are two ways we participate in online communites: "the kind where you're yourself and the kind where you are playing out a fantasy role. For example, the Well is a good example of a place where people are fundamentally themselves. It is not very hard to figure out someone's real name... But there are many online communities where you (a member of the community) actually can't find out who someone's is in "real life." People are role playing, and playing out a fantasy role. Many game communities are like that." (from an interview with Amy Jo Kim, 4/99)

Ms. Kim goes on to say, "I think that these two kinds of community play very different roles in people's lives. The gaming-oriented communities will affect you emotionally, but they won't tend to integrate into your life as what I would call 'augmented reality' communities do. I define these two types as "augmented reality" where you're "you," and you're there to integrate with your life -- deal with the issues in your life. The fantasy communities that are about escaping from who you are and pretending to be someone else. So much about augmenting reality is more about shaping your life. I think that the augmented reality type of communities have become progressively more entwined in people's lives."

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An interesting study: Predicting Continued Participation in Newsgroups

Elisabeth Joyce and Robert E. Kraut hypothesized that “Receiving a response to an initial post will increase the likelihood that the poster will post again”. Conducting content analysis, they coded 2,777 messages from six different newsgroups. The result supported their hypothesis.

For more information about their study, you can get the article from
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue3/joyce.html

Studying Online Social Networks

Although its date is 1997, the article “Studying Online Social Networks” written by Laura Garton, Caroline Haythornthwaite, and Barry Wellman is worth reading because it shows how a computer-mediated social network can be examined quantitatively. The article's web address is:
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue1/garton.html

Characteristics of CMC and Virtual Communities

in the article called "Virtual Behavior Settings: An Application of Behavior Setting Theories to Virtual Communities", Anita Blanchard grouped Computer-mediated communities (CMC) and virtual communities by the timing of the messages (synchronous vs. asynchronous) and the method of the access to the platform. You can see the table at

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue2/blanchard.html#s1

The Soar group : a Virtual Organization

Examining a virtual organization, the Soar group established by a group in Carnegie Mellon University, Manju Ahuja and Kathleen Carley answered the question: “to what extent do virtual organizations resemble traditional organizations?”
Basically, they found that:
-There is evidence of both centralization and hierarchy in a virtual organization. However, this structural form emerged in the communication structure and was not equivalent to an authority structure based on status or tenure differences.
-They also found evidence that in this virtual organization, as in traditional organizations, the structure was matched to the task characteristics. However, unlike traditional organizations, this fit between communication structure and task improved the perception of performance but did not appear to improve objective performance.
Article's web page :
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue4/ahuja.html

WIGLE - Wireless Network Community

http://www.wigle.net

This is an interesting application that "consolidate location and information of wireless networks world-wide to a central database, and have user-friendly java, windows, and web applications that can map, query and update the database via the web." As of today, there are 8 million wireless access points in their databases.
For example, if you want to see how many access points around the University of Baltimore, just enter the zip code on the page and get the map like that

http://www.wigle.net/gps/gps/Map/onlinemap/?addresscode=&citycode=&statecode=AK&zipcode=21201&variance=0.010&s=Show+Address

Glocalization

"Glocalization" is an interesting term from Professor Barry Wellman to define "the combination of intense local and extensive global interaction." (p.3)

You can get the article from this link

A Measurement Study of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~stefan/publications/mmcn/2002/mmcn.html

At this link, you can find an interesting research on a measurement of peer-peer sharing systems, namely Napster and Gnutella. In that paper, researchers illustrate the infrastructure of the systems as well as the topology of the Gnutella Network (as of February 16, 2001). According to the results of the research, they reach this interesting conclusion:

“Another myth in P2P file-sharing systems is that all peers behave equally, both contributing resources and consuming them. Our measurements indicate that this is not true: client-like and server-like behavior can clearly be identified in the population. As we have shown, approximately 26% of Gnutella users shared no data; these users are clearly participating to download data and not to share. Similarly, in Napster we observed that on average 60-80% of the users share 80-100% of the files, implying that 20-40\% of users share little or no files.”

A wikipedia-style dictionary (in Turkish)

Information Design

http://sozluk.sourtimes.org/
At this link, you can find a wikipedia-style dictionary, which is very popular in Turkey. Maybe you can not understand what they are talking about because it is in Turkish. I just let you know that there has been a dispute over this dictionary recently because there was a critique of Turkish Army. After the law trial, the court made a decision in favor of the dictionary and it remains open.

PBDS-720

This message is just for testing the blog...