Tutorial 6: Online Communities

In class over the last few weeks we have been looking at Online Communities. I have chosen to look at one about travel called Travel Blog (http://www.travelblog.org/). This community focus's on peoples travel experiences around the world. It offers people the chance to share photos, videos and their experiences through blogs. Essentialy it is a travel diary. It allows you to link family members and friends to your blog and let them know everytime you add a new post. You can also track your travel using maps and flags. This makes it a highly interactive site. Travel Blog is a free service which makes it great for travellers and its so easy to use!

I believe that people contribute to Travel Blog as a way to share their excitement about their trip. It is a way to keep in touch with friends and family who may be on the other side of the world to you and not miss anybody out! It saves on time as it means you don't have to write individual emails to everyone (although this does de-personalise things a bit). I also think people who use Travel Blog are seeking a way to share travel experiences and offer advice to people who are thinking of travelling in the future.

This is an excerpt from someones travel blog:
"We left for the Vietnamese border the next morning. It was a long drive - 5 hours, we crossed the border with no problems and within 45 mins we arrived at Chau Doc. The afternoon was spent on a riverboat cruise and we saw floating fishing villagers at work.
We arrived at a small place where, after a nerve jangling walk across a rickety wooden bridge we met with some local children. They were keen to strip us of sweets, pens and when these were depleted - cash."

Any online community has ethical issues. Travel Blog definately has ethical issues to do with identity. People can identify them how they wish, so you could have people claiming to be someone else or using a false name. Although you can choose directly who view your posts, blogs can be made public for anyone to see and therefore someone could gain information about you or where you are and use this in an unethical manner.

This online community holds advantages over a normal, everyday community (eg. the people in your neighbourhood), as it allows for communication from all areas of the world that have internet access! It also allows for you to communicate with a large number of people at once, rather than just a few. This can also be seen as a disadvantage though as it does not allow for face to face communication. Blogs can be impersonal and when something is written, not spoken, it can be hard to see where the emphasis is, eg. what the writer found most exciting, or most interesting.

Overall, Travel Blog is a great tool to communicate with people all around the world. I would definately consider using it myself when I go overseas!