Analysis of participation in an online photo‐sharing community: A multidimensional perspective

Oded Nov, Mor Naaman and Chen Ye

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2010, vol. 61, issue 3, 555-566

Abstract: In recent years we have witnessed a significant growth of social‐computing communities—online services in which users share information in various forms. As content contributions from participants are critical to the viability of these communities, it is important to understand what drives users to participate and share information with others in such settings. We extend previous literature on user contribution by studying the factors that are associated with various forms of participation in a large online photo‐sharing community. Using survey and system data, we examine four different forms of participation and consider the differences between these forms. We build on theories of motivation to examine the relationship between users' participation and their motivations with respect to their tenure in the community. Amongst our findings, we identify individual motivations (both extrinsic and intrinsic) that underpin user participation, and their effects on different forms of information sharing; we show that tenure in the community does affect participation, but that this effect depends on the type of participation activity. Finally, we demonstrate that tenure in the community has a weak moderating effect on a number of motivations with regard to their effect on participation. Directions for future research, as well as implications for theory and practice, are discussed.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21278

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:61:y:2010:i:3:p:555-566

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().