Final blog post

It was a fun and eye-opening experience for me to participate in an online community. Before i followed the module Community Building i was not really into only communities (i should have been though!).

It was easy to become a member in the community. The registering was simple and fast and i was immediatley able to become an active member. All functions became immediatley available for me as a newbie. It was kind of difficult though to participate in the community. Because i was new i did not have any 'friends' yet. When i was lurking on other users's profiles i saw that they were all pretty active and had a lot of friends. Which does prove that it is a real community, where people help eachother as often and as good as they can. Users have the same common ground; their passion lies in Cape Town.

Because i am planning to go to Cape Town for my final thesis, joining this community was an easy choice. When looking at it the first time i noticed that it was a big community with a lot of information. Whether it is about safety, food, accomodation, city trips everything can be found in there. And that is what i need! When this module is over i am sure that i will keep visiting the community to get more information.

When i posted my first question i got a respons within half an hour. Which was really fast. Within 2 hours i got a lot of answers which were really helpful. Because users respond that fast i kept checking it a few times a day. Because i don't know much about Cape Town myself and because i was looking for information my participation can be descriped as first a lurker and after a little time as active participant. I've posted questions, but i was not able to help others because i have little knowledge about Cape Town.

The organization of the community appeals to possess the same values as we have talked about in class. The moderation and ranking system is in my opinion good. Moderation is differentiaded in post-moderation and reactive moderation. Members become active moderators by giving them the opportunity to report inappropriate messages. Post-moderation is about the genre the post of a user is about. It has to be related to the kind of forum (there are 3 forums: Travel forum, Technical help forum and the Miscellaneous forum).

The ranking system is clear to everybody and ease to use. By just a simple thing as 'is this comment helpful' one can say if the comment was really useful or not. At the profile of the one who commented the result of the ranking can be seen immediatley. For more widespread information about the ranking system and moderation i want to refer to my previous blogposts.

The community generates money by giving experts and proffesionals the opportunity to become a member too and to track down and post the best travel deals from around the web. There is also a ranking for those kind of participants to see if they are really reliable and trustworthy. At what way the exactly generate money is not clear to me. I guess i have to search this part even more, but i was not looking for this kind of information.

During the seven weeks i was participating in the Cape Town Travel Guide i have learned a lot, i've experienced the advantages of a community myself and i am sure i am going to keep participating in the community. And not only about online communities i have learned a lot, but also about blogging!

* When i am going to manage it to do my final thesis in Cape Town you can follow my experiences on this blog!
I hope to keep you updated in february

Twittering word of the year

Twittering (in Dutch: twitteren) is the new word of the year in the Netherlands!

Check out the whole artical.

Moderation

Because we have talked about moderation in class last week i was curious how the Cape Town Travel Guide handles this. So i went looking for different kind of moderation in this community.

In the forum, by forummessages, there is this link"Report Advertising or Inapproriate Posting". Which you can click on by every message that is posted. To relate to the class Niels gave: this is an example of Reactive Moderation in a community. Users will spot something 'bad' quickly and can alert the moderators by clicking on this link. ( I wanted to know what the message would be when you click this link. But i couldn't because i couldnt find an inapprorate message).

When you want to post a question or if you want to reply, there are several messages in the header of the website. "* This Forum is for asking Travel Related Questions Only. All other postings will be removed.". This means that when you go off topic fe your post will be removed. This is an example of Post Moderation. Every post has to be read and checked by the moderator to see if the post is really relative to travel related questions.

The Cape Town Travel Guide community uses a combination of different kind of moderation. Which i think are good! I think they chose the best ways of moderation. In advantage of the users and the moderators themselves.

Ranking

Last week i have posted my question on the forum and after only half an hour i got a respons. It was really useful and the forum gives the opportunity to decide wether the comment was useful or not. When i clicked the button 'i think this tip was helpful' i got the message that my vote has been registered. But where is it registered to? Does this relate to the rating a person has?

There are three different kind of rankings:

1. VT rank: Your VT Rank is your overall rank as a tip maker and travel forum helper, within the VT community. Your rank is based solely on the ratings that your tips, and travel forum replies receive. While ratings and rank are mostly a fun, semi-serious way to interact with VT friends and to chart your progress, they also help to give a rough indication of where you might be likely to find helpful information. Additionally, it gives a thumbs up to great community members for sharing tips and helping others in the forum.

2. Deals rank: These top ranked members track down and post the best travel deals from around the web.

3. Rookie rank: A Rookie Rank is given to members who joined VT less than a year ago. 'Rookie' is a term usually used in sports that refers to a new player who is in this first year of the league. VT Members can have both a Rookie Rank and an overall VT Rank.

The formula of succes

"Would you like for me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all. You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember, that's where you will find success. "

This is something totally different, but i think it is useful and good to know for all students (actually for anyone). I came across this sentence when i was learning for my other module, Entrepreneurship. And i wanted to share this with you.

Forum

The Cape Town Travel Guide forum is something i did not checked out yet. The forum is categorized in three main forums

1. Travel forum: for questions about the travelling to a certain place or country
2. Technical help forum: for when you have technical issues
3. Miscellaneous forum: for off topic conversations

I like the way the categorized the forum, there is exactly described why they exist and what you can do in each forum. The Travel forum seemed most appealing to me, so i checked this out..

A lot of questions are going on in my head about Cape Town. I don't have a place to do my final thesis yet. The business 4exchange is still searching for a place. But because i can't control it myself i just have to wait. Which i hate! Maybe someone in the forum can help me or give me some useful tips. So i posted this question on the forum. It was really easy to post the question and i had to option to get an e-mail when the first comment was posted. Thats handy! It looked really organized and simple. I think everyone who can use the internet can use this forum. I wonder when i get the first comment..

The forum

About ranking and moderation of the forum i will tell something in one of my next blogs about the Cape Town Travel Guide.

Online communities change the world

A presentation about the impact of YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor and other online communities. Why traditional advertising agencies cannot respond. Power of community opinion.



It also links to a site which is interesting www.globalchange.com. There you can find all different kind of information about how the world is changing in any kind of way.

Travel Page

In my second blog about the CTTG i mentioned that i had created my travel page, which shows to which countries you have been to, want to visit of have lived there. I was curious about what more functionalities this travel page has and what other community members have on their travel page.

For each country you can write a review, as they name it: 'Create your 'country name' travel page'. I wanted to try this so i created a travel page for Belgium. After i was finished with telling my story about the lovely Antwerp i wanted to see how it looked liked. But it looks exactly the same as 'my homepage'. And the map (which i really like) with the overview of placed is not on this page too. But when i go back to my travel map i see a sign 'new' by Belgium. So if community members look on my page the do see that i have changed something in the belgium travel guide. But they don't see what. Prette weird..

Because i don't have any travel buddies yet ( :( ) i am just looking around to people who seem interesting to me; where are they going and where have they been to. They seem to have a lot of information on their Travel Page. Users place articles and blogs about experiences of places they have been to and expand this with pictures they made themselves. Also they place tips about for example restaurants and hotels, which they think are useful to other community members.
It is interesting to read and also useful when you are looking for more information of a certain place. It is easy to search to community members who have been to certain places which you like.

A person's Travel Page

The Youtube Community

I found a funny and interesting movie on YouTube about the youtube community. It tells how important moderating, reviewing etc is.

Just check it out!

Building my homepage

Last time i created my profile to let other people see who i am, where i'm from and what i like/dislike. After logging in the second time i got this message:

"You haven't started building your Homepage yet. You'll have much more fun on VT, when you do. People are much more likely to welcome you, help answer your questions, or just say 'hi'. It's Fast, Easy, and Fun to make a Member Homepage. Our super templates will walk you through the simple steps. In no time you'll have a sharp looking page that you can show the world!"

Than sounded interesting! Creating my own homepage.. I was curious about what this homepage exactly means and what kind of information i can put on it. Can i place pictures? Edit colors and style? Video's? Edit links etc.. ? Can i totally customise it myself? If so.. Yes! I want to :). I didn't know what to expect, so that's when i clicked: 'Build your homepage now!'

I had to give a homepage titel, chapter title and chapter content. I really did not know what the purpose of this information was. Do i just tell my story like in a blog or book on my homepage? But to find out i had to fill in the questions. So i did..

After filling in the questions i got the opportunity to choose my lay- out. But after selecting my lay out they sent me back to the starting page of the 'Build your homepage now' section. That was not what i expected to see! So i clicked on 'my homepage' to see what my homepage exactly means. Well.. To be short; it means that you can put some stories on it which look the same like on a blog. People can give comments on your posts etc.

My homepage

It was totally not what i expected to get from building my homepage and i was kind of disappointed. If i want to tell my story or want to hear specifc things i will post this on the forum. But.. When i put some stories on it people know who i am and why i am joining this community.

Did you know 4.0

'In February 2008, John McCain raised $11 million for his U.S. presidential bid. That same month, Barack Obama attended no campagin fundraisers. Instead, Obama leveraged online social networks to raise $55 million in those 29 days.'

While looking at some movies at youtube I came by the 4th 'Did you know' video. It was the first time I saw this version and i really enjoyed watching it. So for those who haven't seen it before.. Enjoy!

Trust needs to be earned

After the discussion we had in class last week I was curious about trust on the internet. On which aspects do we base our trust in online people?

I found this really interesting article about trust and social networking. According the Charles H. Green there are four archetypes: Zagat’s, Amazon, eBay, and LinkedIn. I think we all know those websites and they all four have found another way to gain trust.

"1. Zagat's started off-line. It presents reviews by the "regular folks"—we trust it because the reviewers are presumably unbiased, in a way that commercial directories presumably aren’t. Zagat’s gains trust through clean motives of “people like me.”

2. Amazon has a recommender system—we trust it because we believe their massive databases dependably predict our likes.

3. eBay developed seller ratings. You can trust the person you buy from online because of their reputation among other previous buyers.

3. LinkedInnetworks you to others by degrees of separation (a la the Kevin Bacon game) to others. You know Bill, I know you, ergo you can introduce me to Bill’s cousin’s friend. This works on the principle of personal relationships."

On http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/118/Trust-and-Social-Networking you can find the whole article. I think it's really useful to read what makes us trust people online. Because in class it was really unclear about our reasons to trust someone online.

Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did!

First experience

Since a few days I'm an active member of the Cape Town Travel Guide (abbreviation: CTTG). First action was of course to register as a new member of the community. I'm used to get a lot of questions when I want to sign in as a member on a new website, so I was kind of prepared to that this time. But hej! This time I only needed to give my user name, my password and my e-mail adres. That was easy! I received a confirmation e-mail within 1 minute and I was ready to go.

Only thing was that I didn't have a profile after signing in; what are my interests? why do I join the cttg? age, gender, ...? To me those things seem pretty useful when joining a community about travelling. At least I am really looking forward to see which experiences people have with Cape Town and why they join the community. I hoped I could personlize my profile when I was actively joining the community. And yes, that was the case. On my personal homepage I can put everything I want. The thing I like the most is the traveler network; here you can see your travel 'buddies'. I hope I am going to find a few before I go to Cape Town :). Also the Travel Map is really great! I can put all places I've been to in there and by a few clicks I can show either I've been there, lived there or I just want to visit the place one day. I'm curious about where other people have been to:).

Places I want to visit? Is there an option 'All of them' :)?

Now I'm really curious about the content that's on it. The head 'travel guide' sounds really promising.I'm looking forward to explore this section this week!

Cape Town Travel Guide

Yes! I've found the perfect community to join, the Cape Town Travel Guide. I've chose this community because I am planning to do my final thesis in South Africa, Cape Town. So I am going for half a year to the most Southern part of Africa. The community can be really helpful by getting more information about Cape Town ( and I am really going to need this!).

There are 733 members of the community that actually live in Cape Town, 5278 Cape Town photos, 12 Cape Town videos and there are 2966 tips about Cape Town. As you can read there is enough for me to find out :).

I feel all information about Cape Town is summarised in this community. I know for sure that I am going to get a lot of useful information and tips. So enough to do for me! I'm off..

How to blog?

First let me get started with telling you the most essential thing about me and blogging: I know zero about it!

While I was reading the 'rules' about the first seven days of blogging I noticed that I already started wrong; rule 1: don't launch your blog until it is properly setup. Well.. My blog has been online for 3 days now and this is the first blog I post. That's not a good way to start ;). That's why I went searching for the beginner rules for blogging. For the people among us that are also new with blogging: I found the most easy looking guide at the internet which exactly tells you what blogging is and how to get started with it.

Now ofcourse your question is: why you start blogging when you don't know anything about it? I am studying Communication and Multimedia Design in the Netherlands. At the moment I am following a module which is called Community Building. One task of this module is to join a community and another task is to start a blog. In this blog I am going to keep you posted about the community I am joining and what I experience in this community. Also I will keep you updated about my other interests concerning social media, marketing, etc.

I don't know yet which community I am going to join since there are so much interesting communities :). So probably my next blog will be about which community I've joined.

Today's task: read beginners blogging guide