Comparing Social Networking to Online Communities | Common Craft - Explanations In Plai... - 0 views
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Barbara Lindsey on 09 Oct 07Important aspect of social networking
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In most traditional online communities, members have profiles that may display a picture, location, recent posts and membership tenure at most. These profiles can provide valuable context to the community, but they are often peripheral to the discussions and remain somewhat hidden.
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In contrast, social networking communities have elevated the user profile to become more like a user homepage that displays a very rich and contextual set of information. The member home pages are not peripheral to the discussions or a subset of the community; they are at the very core of the system.
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In traditional online communities, discussion is the center of the interaction and identity building. Members create relationships (and their own community identities) based on information they post in online discussions
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identities can be built based on the display of the member’s choices of memberships in forums and connections to other people (among other things) on their home page.
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Social networking, on the other hand, enables individual members to share explicit relationships with people and forums. Members use their home pages as rich representations of their preferences- which enable them to express their identity through explicitly shared forum membership and connections to other members.
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Often, traditional online communities are managed so that new forums are built within a specific structure
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An example of bucketed forums may be Technology-->Internet-->Online Communities-->Moderation Techniques-->Dealing with Spammers.
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In social networking, the creation of new forums is done in a more emergent way and within a flatter hierarchy. A single member is free to create a new forum without placing it into a preset hierarchy.
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New forums are a child of the whole system instead of being a child of a more general branch of the system. As new forums gain membership/popularity, they have equal opportunity to gain visibility in the system, similar to the weblog community.
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Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation. Members
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Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation.
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The connections are held together by explicit relationships (people links) and interests (forum links) and do not depend on discussion content.