A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research

A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research
I'm not really a big fan of taxonomies - their main use seems to be to give professors something to name after themselves. A taxonomy - being an organization of entities by keying on particular properties - is always relative to a use (and one would hope - but not always find - the properties relevant to the use). The only use identified for this particular taxonomy is that it is "useful to researchers who seek to pursue programmatic research and theoretical advancement from a variety of disciplinary areas," and is is so by virtue of being simple and universally applicable (or so says the author). It would help researchers form research questions. But (in my mind) not very good ones - we could ask, 'Does a member initiated or commercially sponsored community better foster collaboration?' And maybe even get an answer. More...