Virtual Community

Social media have become a discussion platform for individuals and groups. Hence, users belonging to different groups can communicate together. Positive and negative messages as well as media are circulated between those users. Users can form special groups with people who they already know in real life or meet through social networking after being suggested by the system. In this article, we propose a framework for recommending communities to users based on their preferences; for example, a community for people who are interested in certain sports, art, hobbies, diseases, age, case, and so on. The framework is based on a feature extraction algorithm that utilizes user profiling and combines the cosine similarity measure with term frequency to recommend groups or communities. Once the data is received from the user, the system tracks their behavior, the relationships are identified, and then the system recommends one or more communities based on their preferences. Finally, experimental studies are conducted using a prototype developed to test the proposed framework, and results show the importance of our framework in recommending people to communities.

Since the day Internet became widespread, it included itself in people’s lives with not only its communication content but also its various services (exchange products, etc.). The Internet users were in that sense consumers of the content that is presented in this platform. However, the more the Internet enriched its content and its mediums (cellphones, I-pads, etc.), the more consumers get out of its traditional meaning. Consumers have been employing the new platforms to their daily lives such as blogs, new social networking sites which modify and recreate the internet content. Except creating a global social network system, there is a side-story which includes the marketing side of all these media technological developments. Many corporations, business firms can no longer ignore the power of social media and in fact there is a whole bunch of new recreational market going on in virtual world.

The virtual instrumentation can be used in the educational contexts for simulating the real phenomena which are taking place in different systems. Aims and goals in Sciences school subjects focus on competences of scientific information processing, research skills, and also humanistic values. In this sense methodology highly recommended is centred on inquiry based learning, experiential learning, discovery based learning. This

Neste artigo centramo-nos na relação entre as comunidades virtuais circundantes aos jogos digitais e a produção de conteúdo pelos jogadores, em como o senso de comunhão atua como agente motivador para  criação colaborativa e em como a geração de conteúdo atua em prol da comunidade, na conformação tanto de um ponto de recursos comunal, como de um lugar de referência para a construção cultural comunitária.

... 693 to develop custom Grid portal web applications. ... The File Browser Port-let also supports the ability to create new directories, delete files and directories, edit text files online, upload files to remote file systems and download files to a user's local host, so long as the files ...

This study aims to fill an empirical void in our understanding of how doctoral students, both domestic and international, cope with loneliness and isolation, and what types of tactics they use during different phases of their doctoral studies to overcome such issues.  Data gathered through a netnographic study show that loneliness is a major problem for both domestic and international students and that it occurs at different stages of the doctoral study. Tactics used by participants to deal with this issue include multiple forms of (face to face and online) social interaction, professional development and escape from the doctorate. The paper discusses avenues for further research alongside some practical recommendations that might be implemented at universities to decrease feelings of isolation among students and further reduce drop-out rates.

A third place is any place where people regularly meet for relaxation outside of home or work. Research on third places has been within the context of developed countries and ignores the differences that may occur in developing countries. This study looks at how Generation Y conceives of and uses third places in a developing country. It concludes that Generation Y is comfortable with multiple third places and with using virtual third places to complement or substitute for physical third places. Oldenburg’s conception of third places may therefore be less relevant to Generation Y. Recommendations for reaching this demographic are proposed.

When musical parodies as ‘authentic imitations’ of existing artistic compositions or cultural memes are transmitted through social media, the general public may be provoked and confronted with mixed reactions on decency and other moral issues.  This has the potential conflating to a catastrophic state especially when the audiovisual data have instantly been enabled for public access.

The ‘listen, listen, listen’ phenomenon started when a video, which depicts a moderator named Sharifah Zohra Jabeen dismissing a student from asking questions at a forum held in a local university, went viral on social media on 14 January 2013, while her abusive ‘listen’ catch-line and other humiliating remarks catapulted the public uproar overnight. Immediately following the incident, there came a few parody videos, which appear both satirical and entertaining, to underscore a typical paradox that apparently parallels the many underlying problems of the education and politics in Malaysia, and thus ‘listen, listen, listen’ significantly emerges as a contemporary Internet meme.

This paper deals with a hermeneutic study on the ‘listen, listen, listen’ phenomenon based on online comments YouTube members have posted (3,583 as of 10 October) for a musical parody produced and published by Yuri Wong on 14 January. As commentary from other available Internet platforms is analysed, the use of audiovisual data is also technically observed and interpreted. When net citizens drastically involved themselves through actions of liking, disliking, sharing or commenting on the social media, are they more voluble and honest on the Internet platform? Through this musical parody, what idea did they gather to reflect the reality in Malaysia? Are they ready to appreciate musical parodies?

The discussion continues on possible reactions of the censors in the event when musical parodies allegedly ‘collide’ with the ‘national security concerns’.

Increasingly, consumers interact through the Internet to share their knowledge, experiences, and opinions. Consequently, ‘word-of-mouse’ has become a significant market force that influences consumer decision-making. On the basis of extensive quantitative and qualitative research, the authors sketch how consumers make use of virtual communities as social and information networks, and how this affects their decision-making processes. We present three studies that address (i) determinants and effects of virtual community influence on the consumer decision process; (ii) virtual community participation patterns; and (iii) discussion practices of the most active community members. Key implications for managers, marketers, and market researchers are discussed.

Cyber culture is the most recent signifying system through which
essentially novel experiences are constructed and communicated, accessed and reproduced. Cyber culture emerges from the pervasive impact of the Internet on computer technologies. Several radical innovations in information and communication systems have changed human life beyond imagination. The conventional dichotomy between the real and the virtual has become redundant with the evolution of cyber culture. The article is a moderate attempt to theorize cyber culture as a discourse where epistemological and ideological structures intersect. Cyber culture has transformed the concepts of subjectivity and identity on the one hand and epistemology and pedagogy on the other. The author explains key words like cyber space, cyber culture, virtual reality, the technosocial, virtual community, online identity, cyber subjectivity, cyber power, virtual politics and so on.

Purpose – The importance of virtual brand communities is growing day by day as a result of consumers increasingly using online tools to contact fellow consumers in order to get information on which to base their decisions. For this reason, this work aims to explore some of the effects of ...

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Web-mediated consumer-to-consumer auctions are often regarded as risky due to the opportunistic behaviors in transaction. Online virtual community using feedback-based reputation service is an emerging trust building technology to reduce risk in online auction market. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of feedback profiles on buyer’s purchase behavior. Based on previous researches, a trust-based model is developed to study the relationships among online reputation, trust, risk perception and intention. The model considers both similarities and differences between online and traditional market, it is expected to be a more effective basis for investigation of online consumer behavior.

The social system is profoundly changed, producing important consequences both in the school, and
in our "communities." The concept of community is polysemic and various, depending on the
perspective from which we study it. So, this essay focuses on the nature of the school as educational
community. We try to understand how the concept of community is evolved from the traditional to
a more contemporary vision (§ 1); then we consider the meaning of virtual communities (§ 2) and,
finally, the notion of educating community (§ 3).

The biggest challenge in fostering a virtual community is the supply of knowledge, namely the willingness to share knowledge with other members. This paper integrates the Social Cognitive Theory and the Social Capital Theory to construct a model for investigating the motivations behind people's knowledge sharing in virtual communities. The study holds that the facets of social capital — social interaction ties, trust, norm of reciprocity, identification, shared vision and shared language — will influence individuals' knowledge sharing in virtual communities. We also argue that outcome expectations — community-related outcome expectations and personal outcome expectations — can engender knowledge sharing in virtual communities. Data collected from 310 members of one professional virtual community provide support for the proposed model. The results help in identifying the motivation underlying individuals' knowledge sharing behavior in professional virtual communities. The implications for theory and practice and future research directions are discussed.

With over 57k people following the posts and the conversations, the r/Romania subreddit becomes a relevant online venue for anything Romania, from politics and the fight against corruption to funny images and satire. This research is focused on how the people of Roddit interact and behave, in order to identify if this is a by the book online community. A second point of interest is the content aggregated on r/Romania, and by whom, narrowing the conversation to theories of agenda-setting and digital gatekeeping. The constant debate on r/Romania is jumpstarted by the submission of links and from the forum-like discussions, rendering it mandatory to analyze the content. In doing so, we collected all the posts ever submitted to r/Romania, since its creation in the fall of 2009. Furthermore, in order to have a closer look at the conversation angle, we collected 115k comments from the first five months of this year. The data was gathered by interrogating Reddit's API (Application programming interface). The methodology used combines quantitative large-scale analysis and small sample case studies. Preamble Jürgen Habermas (1991) envisioned a deliberative and participative democracy when talking about the public sphere, Gutmann and Thompson (1996) argued that deliberation is beneficial for every democracy in order to facilitate healthy public opinions, while Douglas Kellner (1998) went further, articulating how as a result of the Internet's expansion we will witness a new