Me and Communities

Until know I never thought much about the meaning of communities, especially not about communities on the web. I chose this module, because I came into contact with this topic and the increasing importance in my job. I work in a marketing company in Aachen.
Now, while reading the list we got for our community building module, I’m pretty astonished about on how many communities I am a member.
Of course, the most obvious, I am a member at StudiVZ, the German version of facebook. Why? Some friends of mine invited me to join – so why not? I also have accounts on amazon and ebay, and before we started discussing about what a community is I really was not aware that these are websites also are communities.
But while we were discussing in class when you are a member of a community I started thinking about it. I recognized that I visit pages regularly to get information I am interested in without signing up. I do not feel like being member of a community, I just read this information for fun but none of this community offers me something that would convince me to become a member. I think this will be a big challenge by starting up our own community, to attract people to become a member.