The Doppler Effect of Online Communities
by Daniel Chudnov

Chudnov writes:

Since this column started last year, I’ve written a lot about two communities that really interest me. One, code4lib (http://code4lib.org) is a community I’ve been a part of since its inception, before we had a conference, before we had an internet relay chart (IRC) channel, and before we had a quarterly journal. Another, Facebook (www.facebook.com) is a community I’ve tried to avoid, despite sticking in a few tepid toes. I don’t want to participate in Facebook for reasons I wrote about a few months back. One of these reasons is that my participation in the Facebook community and all of the seemingly personal connections of that participation are fodder for profit-making activities by Facebook itself and its business partners, salesmen, and marketing agencies alike. That Facebook turned on a service called Beacon that blatantly exploited user activities in service to this objective (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_(Facebook)) shortly after my column about this ran is coincidental. I wasn’t trying to predict that it would happen, I just wanted to highlight that this is what these online communities are ultimately for when they’re run by people with a primary motive of making a profit.

Source: Computers in Libraries

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 12:31 am and is filed under Social Media, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.