Résumé en anglais

The literature on online communities suggests those communities that grow successfully have members who create and share common bonds and common identities. Our goal in this research-in-progress paper is to better understand the impact that shared experiences have on user activities in online communities. We use PLS in a preliminary analysis of the relationships between page views at the online community BigUfans.com and real-life events that affect the online community‟s members. The preliminary results suggest that our model accounts for 60.4% of the variance in page views on the site and 27.2% of the contributions (e.g. message board posts) to the site.