Katarina Stanoevska

Recently, blogs have gained a lot of attention as an instrument within corporate communication. There are numerous discussions and research projects in various academic disciplines about blogs creating a diffuse body of knowledge with different concepts, notions, and ideas. This paper summarises typologies from these different disciplines and tries to integrate them into a multidimensional model in which all relevant aspects and applications of blogs are considered. The results are summarised in the St. Galler blog cube.

Escapism, describing a temporary escape from everyday life into the world of media, is considered as a key driver of media use and has been studied extensively in relation to traditional media such as television. However, in the context of social media, little is known about the prevalence and mechanisms of escapism. Against this background, we conducted an online survey with 775 Facebook users that examined the antecedents of Facebook escapism as well as its outcomes on entertainment experiences. The results reveal that Facebook escapism is provoked by a low need for cognition and low life satisfaction. Regarding the effects, the findings indicate that Facebook Escapism not only fulfills the hedonic need for enjoyment but also the eudaimonic needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Furthermore, we found that differentiating between consuming, participating, and producing Facebook user types is insightful for explaining differences in the relationships of escapism with its antecedents and outcomes.

A new type of communities is gaining momentum on the web and is reshaping online communication and collaboration patterns and the way how information is consumed and produced. Examples of such communities are Wikipedia, MySpace, OpenBC, YouTube, Folksonomies, numerous Weblogs and others. In literature different terms can be found to denote the emerging and growing new phenomenon: social software or peer production. In the year 2005, Tim O'Reilly popularized the term Web 2.0 . While the first two terms can be applied also to earlier, already established forms of online communities, the term Web 2.0 is mostly applied to emphasize the differences of emerging communities compared to earlier forms of online communities, encompassing various perspectives - technology, attitude, philosophy. While, recently the mass media have picked up broadly the term Web 2.0 and the related phenomenon of emerging online communities, there has been less attention in the scientific community. First papers are available that try to define the phenomenon and to relate it to existing developments. Other papers categorize Web 2.0 communities and provide a first detailed description of the various kind of communities. There are also first papers that focus on a certain type of Web 2.0 communities as for example: social networking communities, Online Encyclopedias, Folksonomies. The most widely researched phenomenon are Web-blogs .