Mollster’s blog

For PBase to continue to support the already existing community and garner new users, some new features will need to be implemented.

Printing Service
Already in beta, the printing service will enable users to buy framed or unframed prints of their own and eventually other users' works. This way, instead of just saying that you like someone else's work in a comment or vote, you can buy their works to show support.

Popular Galleries and Images Policies
After extensive debate on the forums, PBase is working on a system that will serve the needs of users that are ok with and support nude photography and those that do not (or atleast don't want to see it on the public areas of the site). One interactive suggestion that has been brought up is a tagging system that will enable users to vote on a gallery as being "innappropriate" for the public areas. Once a gallery or image garners enough of these votes, they will be removed from the public areas for users that elect to have only appropriate material.

This system will bring users together in a common goal of making PBase the way they want it to be. For those that are ok with nudity, they will see it and for those that do not, they won't. In either case, users will aide administrators in cleaning up the site. These are just suggestions and users and PBase administrators are considering other options in this debate in order to ensure the happiness of the most users.

Improved World Database
PBase plans to provide a more extensive world database so that users can look up photos from their area or another part of the world that they are interested in.

Camera Database Changes
Like many other areas of the site, PBase plans to do some changes on the interface to make if more user friendly. One project that I am working on is the camera database where users can find sample images from thousands of different cameras and leave comments or reviews detailing their experience with a certain item of equipment. We are going to make the layout a little easier to navigate and make sure that valuable comments show up on the pages first.

These are just a few of the changes that can  sustain and encourage the community present on PBase. As this community grows, it will be necessary to take on more of these projects to compete with other sites and keep users interested and excited about the services they offer.

Weak Ties
PBase supports many weak ties as a large majority of users do not meet face to face and instead facilitate and develop relationships online. Geographic distance, safety, and lack of interest are the likely causes of the prevalence of weak ties as opposed to strong ones. In any case, weak ties can become very close with many users addressing fellow users by their first names and referring to happenings in their life outside of the Internet.

According to "Internet and Everday Life" in a study by Kakuko Myata, weak ties actually "serve as information bridges across clusters of strong ties". This can occur when a user is referred to the site by a friend or passes information found on the site to one of their strong ties in real life.

Weak ties are limited though since community members are not "embedded in the same day-to-day" environment." In addition, many international users face the difficulty of maintaining a real-time conversation in instant messenger due to conflicting time zones. Therefore, PBase has chosen to only provide a forum and not a chat room atleast for now.

Strong Ties

In some cases, however, PBase has served as a means of creating strong ties between people that live in the same area.  Users have organized meetups in cities around the world including London, Bristol, Toronto and San Diego. At these meetups, users bring their cameras and explore and area and take photos throughout the day. The photos are uploaded and often publicized in the Show and Tell forum as a means for garnering more users to the next event. Most recently, users organized a meetup in Bristol and posted the images.

According to Jenny Preece's Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability, there is a simple checklist for determining the effectiveness and presence of sociability and usability on a website. I will first apply this checklist and later go into the details of what constitutes effective sociability and usability and how PBase fits into these categories.

Checklist for Sociability and Usability for PBase.com

1. Why should I join this community?

• To host your online photos
• To share your photos with friends, family, and other users
• To receive criticism or comments on your work
• To garner publicity via the popular galleries and image areas
• To meet other photographers
• To get advice on specific photography questions

• Register - free 31 day trial period with 10 MB of space
• Can post on forums as a guest
• Subscribe - 2 types of subscription plans
• To leave, write an email to support asking for account deletion
  

• Official Rules - Terms of Service
• Unofficial Rules - Forum
• Ex: Tips for Posting on this Forum for the Show and Tell forum

• Go to the forum or image/gallery you want to comment on and write as a guest or
• Register/Subscribe

• Yes.
• the upload form lets you easily choose one or multiple images to upload
• If you want to leave a comment or guestbook post all you have to do is click a link and write away
• You don't have to be a registered user to ask questions on the forum. Just click to start a topic.

• You only put as much personal information as you like - users post a range from nothing to nearly everything except social security number
• Password protected and non-public galleries - BUT according to the Terms of Service, PBase doesn't guarantee privacy - " If it is important that an image should not be seen by the public, do not put it on PBASE" since users can circumvent safety features.

• To an extent.
• Terms of Service - Pornography and copyrighted images (that are not the users') can and will be removed.
• Photos with nudity are taken off public areas of the site.
• Offensive threads in the forum can be deleted or locked.

• A large variety of active forum topics with experience photographers.
• Many users like the exposure hosting gets them on Google and other search engines as opposed to personal websites.

Content
PBase has the option of taking down images or content that it deems inappropriate at anytime without notice though notice is often given. Most of the time, an email is sent asking a user to take down offensive images themselves before PBase admins do it for them.

Forum
On matters of abusive or legal issues surrounding forum posts, users should contact a PBase administrator, not moderators or writers of the forum software.

Usability: Software

Forum
The PBase forum uses software from phpBB group which is made available under the GNU General Public License and may be freely distributed. Any problems concerning the forum are not to be sent to the programmers but rather the PBase administrators. If a user wants to request a new feature for forum software, they should contact phpBB and leave their suggestion.

What is phpBB?
According to phpBB.com, the software is a customizable, open source bulletin board package. The software is written by programmers who believe in open source software and the importance of stable, user-friendly forums.

Dictionary definitions

Virtual - not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so
Community - a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals

Into the Blogosphere - Why is PBase a "virtual community"?

According to “Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project” by Anita Blanchard, a virtual settlement exists when there are:

1. a minimal number of
2. public interactions
1. comments
2. guestbook posts
3. pmails 
3. with a variety of communicators in which
1. Estimate from the “all users” page – 440400 users
4. there is a minimal level of sustained membership over a period of time.
1. March 2002 – over 1 million photos online
2. January 2003 – over 8 milliions photos online

Also in the Blanchard article, McMillan and Chavis (1986), a “sense of community” is defined under four characteristics:

1. Feelings of membership: Feelings of belonging to, and identifying with, the community;
• Show and Tell Forum – users start a topic, for example, “Vegetables” and show their work and others 
2. Feelings of influence: Feelings of having influence on, and being influenced by, the community;
• HTML and Stylesheets forum – often filled with users who have questions or want comments or criticism of the CSS stylesheets they’ve applied to their galleries
• CSS –  
• “No such thing as a stupid question right?”
• The user, ru1036, wants to change the font size and color of an already existing stylesheet – two users respond with advice on what the user should do
3. Integration and fulfillment of needs: Feelings of being supported by others in the community while also supporting them;
• PaD Discussion forum – users post photos and discuss problems or achievements during their progress as a “photo-a-day photographer”
• “Your favorite image...November 13-19,2006 !” 
• This is a weekly topic that is started by different users who hope to see other PaD photographers’ most successful or favorite picture of the week
4. Shared emotional connection: Feelings of relationships, shared history, and a “spirit” of community.
• Show and Tell Forum – “Snappers meetup – Bristol”
• There are often user-organized meetups in areas with many PBase photographers
• PaD Discussion – “We’ve all been there”
• A user, mesullivan, discusses a very bad week including losing slide film in the mail. Other users comment on her situation and empathize with her misfortune. Some offer advice on how to let it not happen in the future.
  

Emily's Sewing PBlog

• With commenting for other users and guests to post
• A variety of templates and customizable CSS for different layouts
  

Forum

PBase

• News

• for PBase admins to announce new features or other newsworthy items

• Show and Tell

• Announce and discuss photos

• Questions and Answers

• Field questions to other users and PBase admins on a variety of topics

• Feature Requests

• “Request changes or modifications” of the site

• HTML and Style Sheets

• “Customize your galleries”

• PaD Discussion

• “Discuss photo-a-day projects”

• Digital Cameras
• post about new digital cameras, ask questions about a certain model
  
• Film Cameras
• discussion of new and old film cameras and film types
  
• Scanners
• find advice or debate on conversion of film or slide to digital files
  
• Photo Editing Software
• Ask other users or admins questions about programs like Photoshop and PaintShop Pro
  
• Printers
• Topics range from professional printing to at-home small prints on computer printers
  

• Printing and Framing
• Discuss PBase's new printing and framing service (now in beta)
  
• Travel
• Post and discuss photos from trips and vacations
  

Popular Photos and Galleries

• Users’ votes determine which images or galleries appear on these public areas of the site
• 7 day, 90 day, and all-time lists

PBase.com was conceived in July 1999 by Chuck “Slug” Neel, a programmer and photographer who wanted to find a site that suited his and others’ need to share and hot their digital and scanned film photos.

The site officially went online in August 1999, as photobase.org and the site has progressively grown since then. Later, the site name was changed to its current name, PBase, and Emily Neel, came on board to support the website as well.

The site’s motto and goal is to “be the best place on the web to display photos.”

Currently, the site has around 42 million photos. Around 45% of the users are from outside the US. (For example, there are 1329 accounts from users in Iceland.) The site is also rated, 628th, by Alexa.com Internet Traffic ratings.

PBase.com Homepage

Currently, I work for a company called PBase.com, a popular photo hosting and photosharing website based out of Durham and decided with my insider’s look and outside objectivity to analyze the site as an online community.

In this study, I hope to consider all aspects of virtual communites and explore the nature of the variety of social interaction found on this popular photosharing website. In addition to a place to store photos, the site also supports user interaction through forums, comments, votes, guestbook posts, and user to user email known as "pmail".

So as everyone is adjusting their hate of Facebook "news feeds," they've started featuring "sponsored" news on there such as a Facebook credit card and previews for Van Wilder 2. I'm sorry, but I really should be able to turn that off. I don't think I should read that my friend broke up with her boyfriend right next to an ad about a Tahiti vacation for students. I'm ok with banner ads but airing everyone's dirty laundry and making ads look like their part of what your friends are doing on Facebook is just plain weird. 

I am definitely not going to see this. Sorry Facebook.

For another class I'm in on "Environment and Society", we were asked to find ways that we can reduce our ecological footprint. An interesting option that I came across was BeGreen, a social networking site dedicated to reducing their users' carbon footprint. I love the design and idea of the site and many of the suggestions that they give are practical and easy to apply to everyday life. The only part that I don't like about it is that when you are unable or unwilling to change certain parts of your life, the site suggests a certain amount of money to give in order to reduce that impact. While I'm sure this money does help, I think there are better options such as giving more suggestions to how a user can help actively in their community on these issues instead of forking out the checkbook. Overall, I think this is an interesting take on the social networking phenomenon that will hopefully have an impact on the environment.

Death Row Inmates on Myspace