The third task (even though it’s already a while ago, but I have to finish this projectlog soon) was to find out why people do participate in Web 2.0 and Virtual Communities. To find answers to this questions, we did some literature research in the Internet and bookmarked the pages with interesting answers on diigo.com
So I found the following pages:
1.) Criteria for using Web 2.0
2.) Virtual Communites: What and why?
3.) Motivating Users – Peekaboom and the ESP Game
4.) The Art of creating a Community
The first website lists some Criteria when it can be usefull to “add” Web 2.0 Elements to a Website. Mostly related to business websites, they also list user motivation as a main Criteria, for example by letting the users generate or share content and then do something with all the shared or generated content.
Website number two explains shortly what Virtual Communites are and lists some examples of Virtual Communities. Also it gives examples of what people do in Virtual Communites: Socialize, Work together or have conversations about diverse topics.
The site “Motivating Users – Peekaboom and the ESP Game” is about 2 Web 2.0 Websites, that try to motivate their users to tag pictures/parts of pictures by creating a game around the process of tagging.
The last website describes how to create a sucessfull Virtual Community.
So there are many answers about why people participate in Virtual Communties, some where described above and I think one of the biggest one is clearly motivation. If there is no motivation (in what ever form the creators of a Virtual Community choose), nobody will take part in the Community. While reflecting about this subject and wondering why some people invest as much (monetary) unpaid time as you would work in a part-time job, I found out that Virtual Communities are much older then Web 2.0 is and that people were already active in diverse Virtual Communites (Mailbox Systems, Online Games, Chatrooms, …) before the Web 2.0 “hype”. Now with “Web 2.0 Virtual Communites” just much more people take part in them. And investing much unpaid time into a Community also already existed before Web 2.0, even before the Internet. Before the Internet (and also nowadays) some people invested their spare time into clubs/associations (in german called Verein). But nowdays with the Internet and newer Technologies like Web 2.0 more people can connect much easier and find people who are interested in the same topics as they are.
About Web 2.0 there is a very interesting video, made by the same guy as “A Vision of Students today” which I posted earlier in this blog: