Online brand communities reflect a shared interest among participants that sustains community identity around and through brand consumption. While exchanges within such a community are typically supportive, conflict can exist between different, and sometimes competing, brand communities. The phenomena of communities in conflict introduces an element of ‘other’ that allows each community to deli...

As an extension of the International Children’s Digital Library, the ICDLCommunities project will enable children’s communities to develop around the book collection, build tools that allow intercultural communication between children without the use of machine translation, and promote cross-cultural understanding. It will provide a supportive, safe environment for children (aged 7-11) who spea...

Proliferation of network access in the age of the internet has enabled information and knowledge sharing to an extent that was beyond thought a few years ago. In this paper we discuss the impacts of two heavily intertwined trends that have emerged, especially during the past few years. On the one hand, an increasing number of business-to-customer relationships almost requires customers to be on...

Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), which allow simultaneous participation of several gamers, have attracted a great deal of attention recently. Since MMORPGs can be categorized as a type of online community, the behavior of MMORPGs users needs to be considered as the general behavior in online communities. However, previous studies of online communities did not pay enough ...

Online communities thrive on their members’ participation and contributions. There are numerous ways to visually represent information, current status, power, and acceptance of members in an online community. In this paper we present a design of a visualization representing reciprocal and non-reciprocal relationships among users, which emphasizes and hopefully triggers common bond in the commun...

With increasing participation and interaction in online communities, creators and participants in these communities are interested in enhancing the interactions, promoting ongoing interest and building a sense of community. These outcomes involve developing and implementing strategies which will achieve the desired objectives. Given interest in the strategy and governance mechanisms in virtual ...

Despite the fact that online communities (OCs) enjoy a growing number of members, their success is regularly impaired by infringements of user trust by either the community operator or other users. Since previous research studies have focused their investigation of the effects of single IT factors on user trust and participation in OCs, the field lacks an integrative view on how a comprehensive...

Online communities are common means to maintain and extend private social networks. In addition, they also offer new ways for enterprises to connect and collaborate with customers, employees, and business partners. However, key challenge for online communities is engaging community members thereby keeping the community successful and alive. This is especially true for communities, which leverag...