Uh, maybe I could not wait so long between postings? Actually, I finally have a computer so I should be able to post more often. Yippee, WER

Great news, WER!

The best things in life are nearest: in your nostrils. WER

Is the Spring a community? If so, which communitarian aspects does it simulate and which does it thumb its nose at?

Well, Mike, we're more into stimulating than simulating and we don't thumb our noses at anyone (but sometimes we pick them).

She's right ya know. We're working on it. On being a community. There are some meager rules on the main page, nothing beyond common sense and courtesy.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking, Mike. Could you go into a bit more detail? WER

Did I ever mention about how the Spring got started? It started probably with my early exposure to the EIES network and to the WELL in the early days. I remember hitching a ride with fig to the offices of the Whole Earth Software Review where fig was an r:base programmer and looking through the software archives. Cliff turned me on to a copy of Appleworks (which was then a beta) to review and I installed it on my Apple //e and started logging in to the early WELL. I was living in Bolinas on the mesa at the time with Gail Moss and we used to go over to Cliff and Anitas house and hung out and talked about computers and online community some. I had been a "Farmie" for a while like fig and I had some ideals about community building. I had been an urban planner for a number of years also. I thought that it would be cool to start up a community like this in Austin some day. Eventually I did make it back to Austin and started the Spring dialup bbs around the mid 80s. And three years ago we broke it out on the net like I was saying. But I'm getting ahead of the question now.

http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/01/cov_19feature.html is a good article on the meaning and misuse of online "community" - - - - - - - - t h e r e_.g o e s_.t h e ___neighborhood ARE COMPANIES LIKE GEOCITIES TRULY "BUILDING COMMUNITIES" -- OR JUST PLASTERING ADS ON INCOMPLETE, OUT-OF-DATE WEB PAGES? BY JANELLE BROWN | Welcome to my home at GeoCities. I live at 9258 Fashion Avenue, in a neighborhood appropriately called Salon. I moved in here earlier last week because I was told that "Design, Beauty and Glamour are the toast of Fashion Avenue," but so far there's not a whiff of glamour to be seen -- my neighborhood is a ghost town of hundreds of empty pages, half-started Web sites and vacant lots; only a handful of the members seem to be at all interested in fashion. I suppose my bare-bones Web page is no better. GeoCities may call itself the "largest and fastest growing community of personal Web sites on the Internet," but there's no community to be found in my neighborhood. "Community" is quite possibly the most over-used word in the Net industry. True community -- the ability to connect with people who have similar interests -- may well be the key to the digital world, but the term has been diluted and debased to describe even the most tenuous connections, the most minimal interactivity. The presence of a bulletin board with a few posts, or a chat room with some teens swapping age/sex information, or a home page with an e-mail address, does not mean that people are forming anything worthy of the name community. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the free Web page services -- sites like GeoCities or theglobe.com that give away free Web space and then sell ad space based on the traffic that "user-generated content" attracts. Such companies have been the darlings of Wall Street over the past year. But it remains to be seen if they can preserve the cozy promises of community that they've made to their constituency with the lavish promises of profits that they've had to make to their investors and shareholders. Free Web page services are one of the fastest growing sectors of the Web industry, enabling any person with Net access to slap up a Web site using simple tools. You can choose from scores of services: Not only the granddaddies like GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, theglobe.com and Xoom, but smaller services like FreeYellow, FortuneCity, Nettaxi and Homestead. You can even create a home page at your favorite portal; all they ask is that they be allowed to put ads on your page. Undoubtedly, you've visited one of these services at some point -- whether you are a member of one of them yourself (together, the top seven services boast more than 20 million members) or have simply stopped by one of the member pages (GeoCities' member pages alone claim 8 percent of the content on the Web). If you haven't visited one, perhaps you've invested in them instead: Xoom, GeoCities and theglobe.com had three of the hottest initial public stock offerings of 1998, and Lycos picked up Tripod for $58 million, which it now runs along with the previously acquired Angelfire. These companies have ambitiously promoted their "communities," boasting of their astronomical numbers of members and interactive interest groups. But there's a breakdown between what's being hyped and what's actually happening at these sites: Few of the members actually seem to be communicating with one another. Most people, it seems, just want a place to slap up a picture of their cat. And there's more. This is an excerpt.

can't disagree with her...