I’ve been following the discussions on virtual ethnography with interest, and sorry to have been too snowed under (literally and metaphorically) to contribute until now. I think I agree with a lot of what Pearse has said. I did commit ethnographic sins in Virtual Ethnography and in later work I’ve tried to rectify some of them in some of the directions that Pearse advocates. The actual fieldwork in the original book was pretty thin, but I’d stand by most of the theoretical/methodological discussion in which I tried to argue that ethnography needed to be adaptive to new forms of connection and circumstance and take online interactions seriously, but not to assume in advance that any online setting constituted a bounded cultural whole. Miller and Slater argued similarly, with better fieldwork, that one shouldn’t assume the existence of a “virtual” in advance. Actually, I never meant “virtual ethnography” in my usage to imply ethnography performed only in the virtual arena. In the original book I talked about the old-fashioned meaning of virtual, as implying that something was good enough for practical purposes, or virtually the real thing, and I used that to index the need for creative adaptations of method in the face of new circumstances. I wonder now whether we need the label "virtual ethnography" at all? The embedding of internet etc in everyday life seems to me to imply that any ethnographer might be led online by the cultural connections that they follow, and it seems not good ethnography to place fieldwork boundaries according to the medium that happens to be used. Following that line of thought, has “virtual ethnography” simply collapsed back into “ethnography”? That having been said, there are certainly some fieldwork practices that are a bit different in online settings, and some tips and tricks of the trade to make it easier. The late cyberanthropologist Mario Guimaraes described some of the ways that he organized his collections of logfiles, screenshots and field diaries when carrying out fieldwork in The Palace. A short paper of his on this subject is available at http://www.websm.org/uploadi/editor/doingonlineethnography.pdf I learned a lot from Mario’s organized approach to these practices – although I never managed to be that organized myself. Best wishes, Christine Christine Hine Department of Sociology University of Surrey Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/ staff/chine/