Wow, lots of goodies in my inbox today. I want to second Fred's plug for Tiziana Terranova's article "Free Labor." I've used it in a class before and highly recommend it. Plus, thanks to Dorine (hi Dorine!) for mentioning *brand communities*, an interesting concept I hope to pursue further. As always, Jonathan makes a ton of good points, many with which I agree. I don't have a satisfactory answer for why the term community has assumed star status within Internet research except to suggest perhaps that's what happens in the early stages of canon formation: a particular idea or notion or concept is introduced early on and an entire generation of scholars bite on to it in order to find some kind of grounding for their own work. To riff off of Jonathan's post, it would be interesting if Rheingold had titled his book Virtual Kindness or Virtual Good Will There's a number of folks on this list who have been researching and writing on virtual communities for some time now. I'd be interested to hear whether the rise (and fall) of dot.com culture has tweaked their outlooks and directions, either past or present. david silver http://faculty.washington.edu/dsilver/