Flutterby™! :

The quote from that Greenspun note below that caught my attention:

If you still feel that physical communities must always be superior to electronically linked communities, let me ask you to ponder three words: junior high school.

So Philip Greenspun is putting the final touches on Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing before it goes off to the printer. The complete text of the book has been on the web while he's been writing it, but just recently I ran across his chapter on Scalable Systems for Online Communities, his comments on "why we want online communities" are the best reasons we shouldn't lose faith in the 'net that I've read in quite a while.