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A specific example I'm aware of (because I was part of each community)
is:

Chowhounds http://www.chowhound.com/midwest/index.html - Chicago board
gave rise to LTHForum (http://www.lthforum.com) due to dissatisfaction
with the underlying technology and the desire for using better tools to
better communicate.

I would also highly recommend browsing Yahoo Groups
(http://groups.yahoo.com) there are thousands, probably millions of
groups housed there - many of which formed as subsets of other groups.

Another area that would be worth looking at is the changes that have
occurred on many active online social networks with the deliberate
introduction of "groups" (called by different names on each website).
Look at Ryze (http://www.ryze.com) and Ecademy (http://www.ecademy.com)
which are two large and active examples. In each they have grown 1000's
of smaller "clubs" or "networks" which while formed by members of the
main site are now fairly separate and specifically focused. Some of
these groups are very active, while others are mostly inactive.

USENET had a formal (and complex) process for the formation of new
groups, at least off the "main" trees. While no longer highly active or
relevant it could serve as a useful dataset. Google has one of the
largest archives of USENET content (due to their acquisition of
DejaNews) there is also a newer specialized search engine, Guba
(http://www.guba.com) which is focused entirely on USENET search.


Shannon

Founder, MeshForum
"Connecting Networks"
www.meshforum.org
Join us in Chicago May 7-9 2006

-----Original Message-----
From: Social Networks Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Don Steiny
Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 9:54 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Birth of virtual communities

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You might want to look at Usenet, probably the oldest on-line community
dating back to the 70's.  It originally started out as net.one-topic
net.another-topic.  In the mid 80's it became so overwhelming large with
subdivisions an other scheme was developed where there are major groups
like "rec" for recreation, "sci" for science and so on.  Within the
groups there are divisions and when a group becomes starts having much
traffic on a specialty area, then a proposal is make in the group for a
new group and a division is created.

While Usenet is not as active as it once was, it is still active.  It
has been archived on Google for quite a while and there may be other
archives going back further.   The groups are usually identified as
subgroups and the date of the first posting would be the date the group
was created.

-Don

>
>
>
> On Nov 4, 2005, at 4:15 AM, Emilie MARQUOIS-OGEZ wrote:
>
>> *****  To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org  *****
>>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I'm looking for examples of virtual communities that gave bearth to
>> other virtual communities. I mean that the members of one virtual
>> community (a mailing-list for instance) decided to have two virtual
>> communities instead of one. The first one is about a subject and the
>> second one is about another subject (linked to the first one, more
>> specific, for instance).
>
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