The pilot project

Considerations for implementation

Due to the economic importance and extent of the day-trip tourism to this region, Lower Austria was chosen as regional context. Lower Austria´s public TMOs acknowledge the importance of the day-trip tourism for the region and attempt to promote this market segment.

In May 2008 the author examined 136 private homepages of the 780 most active user accounts of the Austrian online forum www.gipfeltreffen.at (Table 3). At that time www.gipfeltreffen.at with 17,352 user accounts claimed to be the largest Austrian online forum for hiking and mountaineering activities. A list of all user accounts was publicly available and sortable on the total number of posts per user account. The total number of posts per user account was used as indicator of a user´s level of activity in the online-forum. The users had the option to offer a personal web-link assigned to their user account and shown on this publicly available list. The examination of the 780 most active user accounts revealed that 136 (17.44%) had such a personal web-link. 70 of these personal web-links lead to personal homepages that content-wise matched with the forum topics. 17 of these 70 personal homepages were identified as blogs. This result on the one hand indicated the small number of blogs about hiking and getaway-activities available on the Internet but on the other hand showed that blogs already formed a large share of 24% of the examined personal homepages.

The aforementioned indicates that at the time of the project in Lower Austria no online community about leisure time activities and based on blogs was available and open for investigation. Only a few blogs existed which were sparsely interconnected and lacked the required magnitude to serve as research object.

Methods 30 The search for blogs with suitable regional content via Google and the manual examination of blogs hosted at websites of popular blog hosting providers like wordpress.com and blogger.com gave the same impression. No indication was found that for another region such blog communities of sufficient size and open for investigation existed, which can be attributed to blogs being a rather young form of web publishing.

Table 3 Personal blogs of forum participants (www.gipfeltreffen.at)

total number of user accounts 17,352

user accounts examined 780 100.00%

user account includes Link to private Homepage 136 17.44% 100.00%

type of website

blog 19 2.44% 13.97%

no blog 99 12.69% 72.79%

page not available 18 2.31% 13.24%

sum total 136 100.00%

results of 780 of 136 of 70

blog, fits forum topics and is personal 17 2.18% 12.50% 24.29%

no blog, fits forum topics and is personal 53 6.79% 38.97% 75.71%

homepage fits forum topics and is personal 70 8.97% 51.47% 100.00%

Based on the small number of blogs available and the lack of linkages between them the implementation of a pilot blogging platform (www.wandertipp.at) for leisure time activities in Lower Austria was deemed necessary to create an example case.

The pilot blogging platform www.wandertipp.at was launched in May 2008. As a focal topic hiking was chosen because sports and especially hiking tours are a primary reason for day-trips to Lower Austria ([Ca 08]).

The pilot blogging platform was based on Wordpress MU which was an open-source software provided under GNU-license that facilitated the operation of hundreds of blogs. Its functionalities were comparable to the Wordpress software which at that time possibly was the most frequently applied blogging software for self-operated blog installations globally. Furthermore the Wordpress software was the software basis for the free of charge blog hosting services offered on www.wordpress.com.

Openness of the platform for contributions of visitors and integration with other

Methods 31 websites are important characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies and were supported by the Software.

Anticipated composition and classification of the pilot online community

F. Henri and B. Pudelko ([He 03]) in 2003 proposed a preliminary framework to observe, analyse and evaluate both activity and learning in virtual communities based on the social learning theory of Wenger ([We 98]). This theoretical framework is intended to allow for a better understanding of the phenomenon of virtual communities and their relationships to socialisation and learning.

In this framework 4 types of virtual communities are distinguished based on the two dimensions ‘strength of social bond’ and ‘gatherings´ intentionality’ that are:

1. community of interest (characterized later),

2. goal-oriented community of interest (f. e. a virtual project team),

3. learners´ community (this type f. e. refers to learning groups of students) and 4. community of practice (f. e. a group of experts in a certain trade).

For a regional TMO that intends to operate a regional online community about leisure time activities in its region and based on blogs the first type ‘community of interest’

seemed most relevant.

Characteristic features of a community of interest are:

 gathering of people assembled around a topic of common interest,

 the interaction of members cannot be assimilated into that of a formal group motivated by a common goal,

 the members identify themselves more to the topic of interest of the group than to its members,

 the learning that results from the participation in the community consists of knowledge construction, the use of which is more personal than collective,

 multi-membership (i.e. membership in several groups) and cross-posting (i.e.

posting the same content in more than one group) positively correlate with the size of the group.

Methods 32 For the pilot blog community knowledge sharing and helping each other f. e. in the form of sharing of tips for leisure-time activities in the region were expected to form important motives for regular community participation. The theory of ‘the strength of weak ties’ of M. Granovetter ([Gr 83]) is one rationale why a community may prosper on such a conception.

The pilot online community was expected to be of the community of interest type of community additionally having comparable features to virtual self-help communities (see section 6.2.5.3, [Ch 04]).