Virtual Community Collide

Yesterday, I had two friends contact me independently. One of them had posted a personal ad on Craigslist and the other one responded to it. They each separately figured out that I knew the other, and were asking me questions about each other. They also both asked me not tell the other one that they had talked to me. I am really amused by this situation.

I am in the process of writing a paper about how community is formed in virtual environments. The premise of dating sites or even sites like Craigslist is that the virtual community and physical community are not very far removed. I’m beginning to see how this works. My two friends have at least seen each other before, they were both at a wedding, and I may have even introduced them at that point in time. They have some commonalities and know a few people in common. I really think that there’s a possibility that they might have met each other in the physical world (and they may already have!) but it was really the technology that helped them to meet each other. Craigslist focused their ability to find those commonalities in each other which are an important foundation for any relationship.

Presentations

We have been studying blogs and blogging in my social software in libraries class. It has been a thought-provoking topic for me.

The blog discussion led me to explore some ideas this morning about presenting. I have to create a presentation for a conference I’m attending in May. It will be rather boring, I’m afraid, so I have been looking into trying to spice up the content with a good graphical presentation. I have been looking into alternative methods of presenting other than using powerpoint. I found an interesting idea about using Dreamweaver instead.

By using dreamweaver, the presentation becomes less linear and more visual. My problem is that I need to start thinking about how to represent my content in a more visual context, and really think about how I’m going to make this presentation interesting.

We have been talking in class about how to make blogs more engaging and interesting, and I find that there is a high degree of cross-over between making content interesting in both blogs and presentations.

I might give Dreamweaver a chance this afternoon.