CMDA

I thought the presentation about CMDA was very interesting! I LOVED my linguistics course as an undergrad, but never thought about applying it to my online community! Interestingly, I DO have logs of my guild members' activity that we can see as members of the guild. You can see how many times each person has posted, when they joined and when their last post was. Quantity of posts alone isn't enough to tell you about a person's participation...but if you pair their number of posts along with how long they've been in the guild and when their last post was you CAN gain a more accurate picture! For example, realising that a person who's been in the guild for over a year should have a LOT more posts that someone in the guild for a month...and if they havn't been there in over a month? Usually we know eachother well enough to know WHY someone hasn't been there in so long...otherwise we contact them with a friendly "how's it going" mail.

Secondly, images/graphics etc DO play a HUGE role in our guild! We have graphics at the guild itself (that we let various members contribute to) and we also have a separate info page. Your design DOES communicate something about your community so it is important if you want to bring new people in!

New Online Addiction!

I may have mentioned before that one of the things that helped gel our Neopets guild into more of a community was that many of us went to Myspace! In addition to chatting at the guild about Neopets-related themes, we were now about to share more personal life experiences through our blogs, messeges and pictures! However, NOW a bunch of us are even MORE hooked on Facebook! This is my first time using it, and I think I much prefer it to Myspace! The number one feature most important to me (as a mom and in getting to know my online friends) is the photo albums. On Myspace it was a bit more difficult to add photos. It took longer and I never got around to adding very many. On FAcebook, it takes merely seconds! And I like being able to see on my profile when people have made comments or added new photos so I can go take a look! I think in an online community where we have NEVER met face to face, this picture-sharing is a critical component! I do not see how any online environment could create a successful community without having a way for people to upload a picture of themselves. I think it is just part of being human, we have a strong desire to SEE whom we are speaking to!