Webinar

Mike - thank you for the tip with the Webinar! I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the talk with about 64 other participants around the world - including 'Guam' somewhere in the pacific ocean. It was actually my first time of a proper Webinar.

The topic was "THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL NETWORKS AND E-DATING: HISTORY, PROBLEMS AND THE POLITICS OF ELECTRONICALLY MEDIATED ENVIRONMENTS" by Celia Romm Livermore.

She checked with the participants who was using facebook, MySpace, Secondlife and Youtube. In this group most of the people used facebook, hardly anyone secondlife.
Her definition for online communities: Online communities that focus on building and verifying social network for whatever purpose - the rise of online communities was a social phenomenon

she categorised the communities as "business service"
* blogging / video service
* group creating service
* virtual consumer communities
* e-dating

She differentiated between 4 places on the axis that defined the nature of the relationship. In the bottom half 'the company' offers space for connecting, but it doesn't get involved. Revenue is generated by advertising. On the top half of the axis 'the company' offers matching services, revenue is generated by offering a service e.g e-dating. I'll show the diagram once I get the presentation.

She explained that Secondlife doesn't fit this categorisation.

She moved on to online dating - where apparently males and females have very different experiences as they found out with a diary study of 17 people. According to her there are more males, than females on online dating sites. Males are more active and aggressive in contacting females. The transition from virtual to face-to-face meetings is very difficult; some men never make the transition.

She continued describing the differences between real life environments and virtual environments and how there is a gap between expectations of truthfulness. The gap is the highest in a communicating environment from one person to another. The gap of expectations is the lowest on a market place - basically people expect to 'ripped off' on a market place face-to-face as well as virtually (e.g. ebay)

She finished on the concept of e-politics and how it accelerated with the event of online communities. She was running out of time then.

I'll check her book out later.