In an online community, new words come and go: today’s haha may be replaced by tomorrow’s lol. Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between s...

A h a d The informational quality of press n w about community health nurses is a critical factor in gaining the required public support for the scarce resources needed to advance community health nursing practice. Using content analyses, 2,561 artides on community health nursing for the period 1978-1981 were coded for key message themes and compared with articles on other nusing subjects. Resu...

We design a field experiment to explore the use of social comparison to increase contributions to an online community. We find that, after receiving behavioral information about the median user’s total number of movie ratings, users below the median demonstrate a 530% increase in the number of monthly movie ratings, while those above the median do not necessarily decrease their ratings. When gi...

Many operators of online communities severely struggle with overcoming the nonparticipation of users and with persuading users to contribute to their platform’s online activities. However, a critical mass of active members who are willing to contribute is necessary in order to make an online community interesting and appealing to existing and potential new users. In this research, we investigat...

A hard challenge facing developers of online communities is attaining a critical mass of members and subsequently sustaining their participation. We propose a new mechanism for motivating participation in interest-based online communities, which engages non-contributing members (lurkers) by modeling and visualizing the asymmetrical relations formed when reading, evaluating, or commenting other ...

Only a match between user’s motives and incentives enables an engaging online community. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the literature on user motivation in online communities into a conceptual framework. The framework categorizes motivational factors along motives and potential incentives and integrates the three major motives need for power, need for achievement and need for affil...

In order to encourage users to participate more actively and bring more contributions to peer-to-peer (p2p) online communities, we propose to create a motivational community visualization based on the social comparison theory. This paper describes the design of static version and a dynamic version of this visualization developed in our lab, explains the advantages and the disadvantages of the s...

In the last decade, collaborative open production communities have provided an effective platform for geographically dispersed users to collaborate and generate content in a well-structured and consistent form. Wikipedia is a prominent example in this area. What is of great importance in production communities is the prioritization and evolution of features with regards to the community lifecyc...

We describe XTreeNet, a distributed query dissemination engine which facilitates democratization of publishing and efficient data search among members of online communities with powerful full-text queries. This demonstration shows XTreeNet in full action. XTreeNet serves as a proof of concept for democratic community search by proposing a distributed novel infrastructure in which data resides o...

Communities offer a context for people to meet, communicate and collaborate. Tools to support communities usually provide a communication medium and functionalities to find communication partners. Thereby, they strengthen existing communities or enable completely new (virtual) communities. In this paper we briefly present some ideas towards the extension of community support to mobile environme...