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Communities
on the Web
Whether you are
a newbie, a senior citizen or a guru, you may want to see why
Online Communities are gaining in popularity.
The explosive growth of the Internet and man's
need to communicate has really helped the online community sector
to grow astronomically. According to The Online Publishers Association
in cooperation with Nielsen/NetRatings, 40.3% of the time spent
on the Internet is spent on communications while 37.4% is spent
in content sites. The time people spent in March 2005 communicating
amounted to a staggering 631 million hours
Online Communities are gathering places for
thousands (and at times millions) of people where important
and trivial issues are discussed. These gathering places are
even more popular in certain countries such as Korea which are
collective societies. The popular Web-sites of Korea are community
sites such as "Daum", "iloveschool", "freechal".
Some research also shows that children are more likely to join
online communities than grown-ups.
One of the most important developments of online
communities is communities of interest such as IT user groups
and forums. Such groups range from the ones aimed at novice
users (e.g., the
Tampa Bay Computer Society) to ones geared for senior citizens
(e.g., The
PC Users Group of Connecticut) to others that discuss processes
that run on your computers (e.g., Process
Library Forum) that target very specialised types of users
such as XMLpistop.com
which is an excellent resource for XML and .NET Developers.
Members gather around their common topic of
interest and interact with each other very regularly through
chat rooms, message boards, and discussion groups. Many user-groups
support extensive member interactions and have a substantial
amount of user-generated content. The content is owned and validated
by the community.
Since we work closely with a number of IT-related
user groups, I regularly receive newsletters that contain some
highly relevant content both to me as a computer user and in
my Uniblue hat. A recent newsletter has a three-page spread
of how to go about buying a new computer. Another newsletter
had interesting updates on spyware and viruses which sparked
off a series of four articles on the subject. Yet another user
group newsletter contained tips and tricks on how to use search
engines. Many contributors to these newsletters (also published
on websites) are specialists working in IT, consultants and/or
journalists who are prime sources of information and thought
leaders. They have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share
and they are usually very forthcoming.
Online communities are really transforming the
way we interact with each other across national and international
boundaries. We don't need to be physically present to have meaningful
chats and build relationships with other users with similar
interests or businesses.
Have a tour of our
forum that specialises in computer security for anyone who uses
a PC.
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