I want to recommend a book to folks. It's called "Science Fiction Culture", by Camille Bacon-Smith, from the U of Pennsylvania Press. (isbn 0-8122-1530-3). It's available from Amazon, FWIW, or use your favorite. Camille is an ethnographer who did a study of science fiction and its people. It's a book for list managers on a couple of levels. First, there's a large part of the book that studies the on-line SF community, and there's some interesting community-building data in there to mine, both ideas for building and perspective on what makes them click. Beyond that, however, there's a lot of good information on what communities are, and why they are, things that will better help people understand how to interface the virtual world into real world populations and communities. Since the SF world adopted the virtual world and built virtual communities long before they became household worlds, it's a lot more of a mature community than you'll find elsewhere, with some nice hints on where we're headed. I should note that I know Camille through my SF work, although not well; and the material she covers, especially the on-line stuff, are things that I was a part of and was involved in to a large degree, and from my perspective, she hits many more homers and triples than singles here. I was not, however, involved in the book in any way, interviewed for it, and didn't contribute in any way. I just think it's a very nice peek into a very large, complex culture that anyone hoping to build or integrate online components into a community could use as a resource. chuq -- -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"
