Although many online vendors have sponsored virtual communities (VCs) in the hope of reaping commercial benefits from it, not many have been successful in reaping commercial benefits from their VC. Online vendors can benefit greatly from having a VC, if the VC members can be converted into online buyers. This study examines the conversion of a VC member into an online buyer. Using a classical-c...

Increasingly, organizations are harnessing communities of practice to carry out important knowledge management functions.3 However, a significant first step is identifying the community, which often doesn’t designate itself as such, and its members, who don’t know they belong! So, this step involves determining which people in a community of practice have common interests in particular practice...

Web crawlers have been used for nearly a decade as a search engine component to create and update large collections of documents. Typically the crawler and the rest of the search engine are not closely integrated. If the purpose of a search engine is to have as large a collection as possible to serve the general Web community, a close integration may not be necessary. However, if the search eng...

The rapid development of Web 2.0 allows people to be involved in online interactions more easily than before and facilitates the formation of virtual communities. Online communities exert influence on their members’ online and offline behaviors. Therefore, they are of increasing interest to researchers and business managers. Most virtual community studies consider subjects in the same Web appli...

A number of studies have demonstrated the efficacy of environmental change strategies (ECS) in effecting community-level change on attitudes and behaviors related to underage drinking (Treno and Lee in Alcohol Res Health 26:35-40, 2002; Birckmayer et al. in J Drug Educ 34(2):121-153, 2004). Primary data collection to inform the design of these strategies, however, can be resource intensive and ...

The transfer of new discoveries into both clinical practice and the wider community calls for reliance on interdisciplinary translational teams that include researchers with different areas of expertise, representatives of health care systems and community organizations, and patients. Engaging new stakeholders in research, however, calls for a reconsideration or expansion of the meaning of ethi...

Fledgling online communities often hope to achieve critical mass so that the community becomes sustainable. This concept however is not well understood. At what point does a community achieve critical mass, and how does the community know this? Furthermore, online communities become sustainable when they achieve a mass of what? We explore this question by analyzing growth in a large number of o...