Revolution and evolution of online communities

Citation

Schwartz, D. (2007), "Revolution and evolution of online communities", Internet Research, Vol. 17 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2007.17217baa.001

Revolution and evolution of online communities

The power, reach, and influence of virtual communities are perhaps the greatest revolution that the worldwide web has brought upon society. As the ease of online participation and richness of experience continue to grow there is no question that new realms of social interaction along with new forms of community will evolve. The socio-technical union of creative, effusive, and oftentimes incessant users on the one hand with digital communications technologies underlying information sharing applications and web sites on the other, has fueled the growth of sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, and Friendster to name but three. We begin this issue of Internet Research with three articles dealing with different aspects of online community.

Drawing inspiration, perhaps, from the resounding success of hybrid click and mortar e-commerce strategies relative to pure online e-tailing, Lin has chosen to investigate the synergies made possible by combing online and offline community building activities. The result is an outstanding empirical study on “The role of online and offline features in sustaining virtual communities”. It will be interesting to see if, like in e-commerce, there is a shift from pure online communities towards the communal equivalent of click and mortar.

Communities, as we know, may not always work towards a socially or legally acceptable goal, a prime example being the massive communities of P2P music sharing members whose primary goal is to circumvent the need to legally purchase their music. However communities, even such as these, can be influenced if we but know how. Chu and Lu provide us with some new directions in which online music purchase can be encouraged in “Factors influencing online music purchase intention in Taiwan: an empirical study based on the value-intention framework”.

The success of an online community depends to a large extent on the size and strength of its network of users, and in no small part on the basket of interaction tools made available to its members. In “Network externality and future usage of Internet services”, Chun and Hahn investigate the relationships between local network size, network strength, and total network size with respect to the interaction services offered on the network.

One of the most annoying aspects of online-living is the control we have lost over e-mail communications due to the proliferation of spam. “An overview of the sender policy framework (SPF) as an anti-phishing mechanism”, by Stefan Görling, provides important insights on a potentially helpful mechanism to improve our abilities in dealing with spam and hostile email messages.

Studying patterns of how web site design and information content evolve can be both fascinating and rewarding. Formal techniques that guide this type of research are still in their infancy. Coining the term “Internet archaeology”, Waite and Harrison present a novel approach to measuring the changes in web sites over time and apply their technique to the sector of pension fund web sites. Another way in which a web site can be examined is through its link structure. In “The impact of web site structure on link analysis”, Mandl uses data mining techniques to show how page ranking algorithms that are based on in-link counts to a web site may be biased depending on the hierarchical structure of the site itself. We conclude this issue with an article by Navarro and Fernández-Valmayor, who have developed a Pipe notation to aid in the characterization of web sites, and apply their technique to hybrid web sites which contain both structured an unstructured information elements, moving us another step closer toward the “Conceptualization of hybrid web sites”. Formally representing the structure of a web site is a challenging task and the representational tools available today are often inadequate, particularly in light of our need to effectively adapt and change web site design over time.

David Schwartz