The boardscape: Creating a super social network of message boards

A Web-based message board or forum is an online area where discussions are held by many Internet users on a variety of subjects. More recently, online social networks have been created for various purposes: job searching, dating, band promotion, etc. Many social networking sites have also incorporated community discussion features such as message boards. Rather than add a message board to a social network, this paper proposes to take advantage of the large number of message boards and implicit virtual communities that are already available to automatically create a "super" social network. The Boardscape is this network: an interconnected set of bulletin board users, message boards and topic threads with semantic definitions linking the various pieces together. We will discuss our approaches to realize the vision of the Boardscape, including Klostu and the SIOC project¹.