Web services support virtual communities
In the August 2006 issue of EContent, Bob Doyle’s article “Community Portals and Plaforms” examines how websites support collaboration in virtual communities through multiple tools integrated by web services.
Content management refers not just to documents and text, but to aggregating and making available information about people in collaborative settings. Bob reviews IBM’s “Blue Pages” and other means of providing information about expertise, and methods of aggregating blogs and providing feeds from a Wiki.
Bob describes gathering posts on email lists for display in the main content management system, and points out that commonly collaboration is based on loosely aggregated systems, each with particular applications and databases, connected by RSS feeds and AJAX user interfaces.
An organization can collaborate on a Wiki and feed the content to members of the community for reuse. Organizations can bring content from the web into the content management system. This includes popular content like del.icio.us bookmarks and Flickr photos.
A futuristic implementation was described at the recent Collaborative Technologies Conference in Boston by John Seely Brown. Second Life, a three-year-old collaborative community platform, is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its more than 400,000 avatar residents.