Virtual Communities

One of my seminars this semester is called: "Von Parallelen Welten: Doppeltes Bewusstsein, CyberSchamanismus & digitale Rituale". As Cybershamanism and the like isn't really what I'm interestd in, I decided to give a presentation on Virtual Communities, as that's a possibility to pass that course too.

The aim of this post is just to collect a few interesting links and see what I can come up with in connection to that topic:

There's the online-version of Virtual Communities
...and a book-review

Over at Communigations there's a post about meeting Howard Rheingold.

Lots of stuff on virtual communities is to be found here

Virtual Communities - Public Relations Building:

Virtual communities differ from traditional communities in that formation does not occur because of common location, but because of a common interest. Such a foundation demonstrates that communities can exist through mediated communication. A theory has thus arisen that virtual communities are providing the means to greater community participation - through gaining information people are able to participate fully as citizens (Hartley, 2002: 231-232).