Information Technology Reference
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about their day-to-day lives, often focusing on
personal thoughts and feelings. Just as interac-
tive online social networking sites (SNSs) like
Myspace.com and Facebook.com, blogs facilitate
communication and information sharing among
peers. Communication and knowledge sharing
via blogs is typically conducted in the form of
text-based posts, and recently other innovative
media content is being incorporated including
video clips (Herschel & Yermish, 2008).
During the process of knowledge sharing via
blogs, two stages of asynchronous information
exchange are repeated. Bloggers first present
their own beliefs, ideas, or references to other
information and share this with a network of peers.
Feedback in the form of comments from other
bloggers is then posted in response to initial posts.
In this way, users are able to maintain mediated
conversations (albeit asynchronous). Stefanone
and Jang (2008) suggest that the broadcast nature
of journal-style blogs actually functions to reduce
the communication costs associated with com-
municating with a group of friends and family,
regardless of age.
An important factor affecting the proliferation
of blogs is ease of use. This is due to the wide
variety of software applications and hosting sites
available to users. These tools allow anyone with
access to a computer and the Internet to create and
maintain blogs because little technical knowledge
(e.g., HTML) is required (Stefanone & Jang,
2008). Convenient features like trackback, linking
and comment posting encourage people to provide
feedback both on original posts and previous
comments, ultimately promoting interactive com-
munication. This knowledge sharing via blogs is
also being adopted as a tool for online marketing
distribution for business purposes (Wood, Behling,
& Haugen, 2006).
Virtual communities are 'social aggregations
that emerge from the Net when enough people
carry on those public discussions long enough,
with sufficient levels of emotion, to form webs
of personal relationships in cyberspace' (Rhein-
gold, 1993, p.6). Even though virtual community
members typically do not have any connection
offline, they engage in interpersonal communica-
tion in these online communities and share their
knowledge and experiences together (Hoffman &
Novak, 1996; Kozinets, 1999; White & Dorman,
2001). For example, virtual community members
share praise and complain about products and
services.
Online video sharing tools are the most recent
and emerging tool for knowledge sharing and
include sites like Youtube.com and Metacafe.
com (Herschel, & Yermish, 2008). These sites are
comprised of videos created by ordinary people
and have been evaluated as 'the most successful
of the social network product/services' (Marcus, &
Perez, 2007, p.927). Rainie (2008) used national
survey data to explore online video sharing and
found that over 48 per cent of Internet users visit
video sharing sites like Youtube, with the popular-
ity of video sharing having grown by more than
45 per cent in the past year. Online video sharing
contributes to information and knowledge trans-
fers (Herschel &Yermish, 2008) and facilitates the
construction and maintenance of culture (Marcus,
& Perez, 2007). The practice of video sharing is
clearly a popular and influential development for
resource exchange online, and like blogs, is easy to
use. Videos are simply recommended to others by
simply embedding URLs in e-mail messages.
applicationS in marketing
In the field of marketing, online information and
knowledge sharing is seen to possess remarkable
potential. As described earlier many consumers,
and potential consumers, have conversations via
online ICTs like e-mail and blogs, and marketers
believe that these virtual conversations can be used
as an effective channel for conveying promotional
information for products and services (Datta,
Chowdhury, & Chakraborty, 2005; Gremler,
Gwinner, & Brown, 2001). Carl (2006) and Walker
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