A couple of months back Katie Harris down in Australia posted a comment referring to an entry in her blog–Zebra Bites. It's a blog worth reading and I've added it to the list on the right. The content is interesting and it's a much better looking blog than the one you're reading right now. (I recognize that's a low bar.) The entry to which she referred me is about the different kinds of insights we can get from online communities. It categorizes communities into into "existing" and "manufactured." I think this kind of thing is terribly important right now. We are in the process of inventing a new methodology and for that to work we need to be able to structure our thinking and our research processes, something one might argue was missing in the initial rush to online panels and surveys, something we only now are trying to sort out.
As I read Katie's stuff I was reminded of a piece on roughly the same topic that I had seen in IJMR earlier in the year. This was a piece by Niels Schillewaert, Tom de Ruyck and Annelies Verhaeghe titled, "Connected Research: how market research can get the most out of semantic web waves. These folks all work at Insites Consutling, a Belgian company that seems to always be in the vanguard of new online methods. The article sets out a taxonmy of online social media that is similar to what Katie has suggested, although they go into a lot more detail. What Katie calls "exisitng" they call "secondary connected research." Her "manufactured" they call "primary connected research." But no matter what you call it this is a very useful way to think about the space and the kinds of insights we might get along with the bias stemming from who we may be listening to. Both should be required reading for anyone interested in Web x.0.