The power of communities

The communities do exist and their development has become more important with the internet tool.
But what are the determinant of a community?
With the emergence of the blogs, the internet users became more and more important at the expense of the classical actors (journalists, politicians, ...)

The behavior of the internet users:
An analysis of their behavior on internet explain how is built a community: it s a grouping of people looking for the same interest and seeing regularly the same websites. Their common interest can be video games, books, movies, etc ....

The interactivity:
These people gather some information or can sometime improve a content which already exists.
The best example is Myspace where the internet users are actors and creators of the content. By using the new tools of the web2.0, the virtuous circle of writing/reading/writing can be set up. This will attract new readers and keep the "old ones" attracted.

These two components are the basis of a community. The will of the users to improve the community (by posting regularly, commenting, designing the website) makes the difference between an ordinary community and a famous one.


Some business have already find how to use a community to create profits.
Pickspal is a "new" (since november) US website on sport betting based on a very interessant concept.
Its main interest is the convergence of ideas and the comments of subscribers.
The principe is very simple:

1. Some experts make a bet
2. The subscribers comment it
3. The total of comments gives a general tendency
4. This tendency is used to bet

At the end, the compilation of the fans can be better than experts' one!
This example show us that communities have a real power and can be a profitable market. Knowing how they operate can provide a huge business for companies.

The political e-marketing

In April, each French will have to choose a new president. There is already 35 candidates, but 6 of them will probably share 99% of the vote (S. Royal, N. Sarkozy, F. Bayrou, J-M. Le Pen, D. Voynet and A. Laguiller).
The French legislation is very strict about politic:
-Any news-man linked with a political party has to make a break during the campaign.
-The time of speaking of each candidate (or supportive people) in the medias is count and they have to be equal at the end.
-TV adds are forbidden
-Public notices are limited to specific areas, with the same space for each candidate.
-Companies support is forbiden (they can't provide funds to political partys).
-etc ....

But this time, the politics use a "new" media out of control.
For 2 years now, internet has fully entered in the communication plan of politicians.
The right party (UMP) started the "war" with:

• -adds on google
• -spams
• -podcasts on blogs

Now, each party use these ways to present its program.
Some new tools measure the noise made by the political use of internet (Tendançologue for the RSS Flux, Politibuzz for the blogs and the Présidographe for the search engines).

The principal limits of the "e-campaign" is the emergence of videos published without approval and control on Youtube or Dailymotion detracting some candidate.

Even if nobody knows the exact list of the candidates, the campaign is already virulent on internet and would become more and more important in the next months. It is impossible to assure this media will have an important role in the choice of the internet users, we will have the answer on May 6th.

Me

Hello,
As all of you I'm a internet consumer, but I come from Europe (France) what makes my "e-behavior" being different.
We have already seen that there is only a minority of European who use Internet, and if you have studied in France, you may have been surprised by the archaic system set up in our universities.
In my futures post, I will give some exemples of the new opportunities offered by Internet. Some of them would seem obvious, but a gap between our e-culture can explain it.

PS: As a foreign student, i'm also here to learn a language, so please notify me my mistakes to enable me to progress. If you don't understand a sentence, post a comment, i'll change the syntax (may be the most difficult thing to learn in english :))