Shared workspace and group blogging experimentation through a living lab approach

For many years, it was assumed that technical features were the most important ingredients to support an effective and efficient collaborative platform. Nowadays, ICT users are creating value in massively populating web applications and online role-playing games with their own activities and related data (i.e. eBay, Amazon, Linked-In, FaceBook, SecondLife, World-of-Warcraft). When looking at the global success of online social networking, online presence and other popular web applications, one may realise the crying users´ need to have collaborative platform supporting also social interactions with dedicated social features instead of purely focusing on technical features. This paper presents an empirical study on the use of both shared workspace and group blogging forming a collaborative platform. This study has been conducted according to the Living Lab user-centred research approach through the use of an exploratory environment as being a real life experiment. The basic idea was to engage a community of users into the collaborative concepts experimentation during their project activities. Important issues like whether the collaborative platform has helped in somehow sharing knowledge and reaching a mutual understanding as well as overcoming various types of collaborative distance are also discussed in this paper.