I chose to look at virtual communities in libraries for my paper topic. In doing so, I established a mock “virtual community” of my own. Utilizing the principles of “The Long Tail,” I set up a wordpress blog for a very, shall we say, “niche-market” movie. Its a strange film from the 90s, that has a small following. I figured that this niche film would prompt people to participate in the community more than if it were a wider-known movie.
For the paper I discuss the results of my mock virtual community. For 14 days I posted a new point of discussion on my blog, with several links and tags. I also advertised my blog through a new website each day. For example, I set up a facebook page for the film one day, and another I twittered that I was reading my blog (and gave the blog address). Since I am not done writing the paper, I’m not going to disclose the movie I used… I am trying to keep the data as raw as possible, where all hits were random from searches and/or people seeking out info on this movie. I’ll post it when I am done!
In my paper I discuss how libraries can set up their own virtual communities. There were several successes and roadblocks that I found in my experiment, which I share in the paper. Basically, the paper is a blend of The Long Tail, virtual communities, and how libraries can best gain interaction and participation through online users. This project has personally helped me to grasp the steps involved in creating virtual communities. It was also fun to watch my “movie community” grow through the blog stats. 
-LTL
What an interesting idea! A lot of thought went into this. I’ll be interested in finding out what movie this is when you post it.