The Hitchhikers Guide to an Online Community

The topic that's on everyones tongue this week is, 'What is an online community?' According to commoncraft, 'An online community is a group of people with common interests who use the Internet (web sites, email, instant messaging, etc) to communicate, work together and pursue their interests over time.'

A community is usually seen as a group of people that live close together or have something in common with one another. An online community on the other hand expands on that by providing the opportunity for people to connect from all around the world on a particular topic, whether it be work, study or other interests, as long as it is a shared interest within the group.

An Effective Online Community

To help set the standards for an effective online community, Marisa Peacock published a post within CMSWire to help highlight some of the key features found within these communities.

Culture: It is important for a community to cultivate their own type of culture that members of the community can enjoy and encourages participation within the community

Metrics: The opportunity to monitor social engagement through analytics and other data collecting should be provided for the community creators/community.

Transparency: Freedom of speech should be allowed, with negative and positive comments both forthcoming, but at the same time, the community should be monitored for antagonistic comments, and other unpleasant comments that are not beneficial to the community.

Engagement: Everyone should benefit from the flow of conversation throughout the community, and once should even go as far as providing opportunities for innovation and crowd-sourcing. Discussions should engage members of the community.

Value: The online community should contribute value for all members which will be dependant on the scope of the community.

Conversations: Engaging with others and contributing ideas within the community is important to maintain good conversation. 

These 6 key features should be followed to maximise the efficiency of an online community.

Just some places to search for Online Communities

My Facebook friend's groups

Facebook

Facebook is one of my most used social networking sites (as it is for most) so of course it is where some of my more favourite communities reside. Facebook has the ability for anyone to create or join pages, where communities are then formed around particular likes/dislikes/etc. But I personally wouldn't say this is the best online community around (Facebook has gotten quite bad quality-wise recently).

Tumblr/other blogging sites

Blogs are usually good places to look for a thriving community. An individual can start following another blog page that appeals to them, and then can repost, like or comment on the posts made by the page, engaging with other members within the group about the topic of the post. Though I have a Tumblr page, as I said in previous posts, I'm still not confident with blogging, so I don't often use Tumblr.

Gaming Communities in Video Games

These can be found through tribes, guilds, clans or LiveFeed channels, and are usually filled with gamers looking for support or a community to engage with about games.

Some Others

A few more communities can be found in Twitter, Twitch, Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus and many more. If you spend a little time trying to find them by searching keywords of a particular like or interest you have in Google, you will find gateways to possible communities you could join.

That's all folks

And with that, we've reached the end of this weeks blog. I hope you enjoyed it. Get  out there and start twittering/blogging/twitching/you-know-what-I-mean!

Until next time.
This is Brian F.
Signing Out.

The One True Online Identity

Well here we are. It's my second blog post. I'm glad we could all be here together to witness this moment. After all, blogging is all about sharing my experience with everyone else(as well as my opinion). So let's have a look at the Online Identity that I intend to create.

Personally, I haven't used many social networks other then the most basic and popular. Facebook (though I am becoming rather tired with Facebook these days), Snapchat and Instagram are the essentials. I have tried my hand at Tumblr, Google+ and Twitter, but I've never truly gotten into the spirit of these social networks. They just don't hit me in my social networking sweet spot, you know?

When it comes to blogging, I'm even more inept because of my lack of interest in blogging, or my lack of knowledge on it. I've only ever done a couple of classes that required blogging, but if I say so myself, I didn't pick it up as well as I could have. Nothing ever seems good enough to blog about. It may be a reason why I enrolled into this class, to gain more blogging skills. I need to learn not to ramble, and to get to the point faster. I need to personalise my blogs. I need to have a more interesting life to blog about. So on and so forth.

Personality on a blog is important from what I've gleaned from other people's blogs. You can blog about something as much as you want but the real popular ones are the ones that people can connect with because they feel like genuine people with genuine everyday problems. My goal is to try to be as genuine as possible, which may be a little difficult seeing as I have a tendency to be rather professional and boring during most pieces of uni work. A small problem, but easily fixed I hope.

I prefer to keep my professional life separate from my personal life. I barely post on Facebook or Snapchat about my personal life's goings on already, and I only add people that I know or have met. So when I post online, I am comfortable in knowing that whatever I post will safely be protected by my friends and family. Otherwise, if I add more people that I'm not sure about, I usually place them into groups where I can exclude them from certain posts. I like the divide, keeping my professional life away from my personal. It gives me two different worlds I can live in, two different Brian's I can be. A strange look on it I admit, but my view nonetheless.

Well then, I hope that helped you all understand what sort of blogger I'm aiming to be after reading this.

Adios friend.

This is Brian.

Signing Out.

Just a little bit about me

As you hopefully should know by now, my name is Brian, and I'm currently in my fourth year at QUT, and also my last semester! So obviously I am rather excited about this semester overall. This blog has been created for the unit IAB260 Social Technologies. I have dabbed into other fields as well apart from IT, such as film, creative writing, game design and more, because I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could in the amount of time I had.

Apart from uni, I also work at BWS part time. Though I haven't actually had a notable promotion apart from being made part-time (BWS only really has sales assistants and then managers), I can basically run the whole store by myself now.

Outside of work and university, I do a lot of Hapkido, the occasional Taekwondo class, as well as gym and other fitness classes. I'm a little paranoid about becoming unhealthy, there's too much fast food and internet everywhere!

This is me in all my glory

I'd like to think I'm a funny guy. Most photo's that can be seen of me, I will usually be pulling a face of some sort, though there are some good photos as well... I just don't upload them. I'll always be looking for somewhere to crack a joke, or 'make a funny', but I'm also very focused when things need to be serious. 

The final thing about me that I can tell, is I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Whenever I try to do something, I'll attempt to do it to the best of my ability, no matter what it is. The only problem with me is getting started on doing whatever that something may be.

And that's about as much as I can tell about myself. I hope you'll all stay tuned to this blog to find out more about what I blog. I shall endeavour to make it as good a read as possible!

Brian F signing out!