Posted on 15 February, 2008, 11:36 am, by Daniel, under Community, Teaching.
Yesterday I was a guest speaker on a course at our department, called “Creating Experiences in Digital Media”. The course belongs to our undergraduate program on “Digital Media Production”.
I was asked to say something about success factors in relation to online communities, and although it’s not something that I usually talk or write about it was an appealing challenge to summarize my thoughts on this topic. Below you can find my PowerPoint slides (in Swedish). The message of my last slide is “Think community before technology”. I think that is true if you want to have success building an online community. However, my PhD work actually focuses on the real importance of technology and points out the need for an awareness of the complex relationship between social interactions and technical features in online communities.
Posted on 8 February, 2008, 1:26 pm, by Daniel, under Community, LunarStorm.
Accordning to Dagens Nyheter, LunarWorks is up for sale. LunarWorks owns not only LunarStorm, but also photo-sharing site Bilddagboken and translation site Tyda.se. With the arrival of Facebook in Sweden, both LunarStorm and other national community sites have seen their population decrease dramatically. Therefore it seems likely that both Bilddagboken and Tyda.se are more interesting acquisitions than former flagship LunarStorm.
Even though Facebook probably has something to do with the “fall” of LunarStorm as the most popular community site in Scandinavia – I can’t help but thinking that the consequences of having founder Rickard Eriksson leaving LunarStorm might have been greater than expected. Rickard left in September 2006 and even though i don’t have the statistics I would say that it has been going downhill since that day. Perhaps Rickard could sense that the era of LunarStorm was about to end. Or perphaps LunarStorm just lost its soul when the originator decided to move on.
