Rating: 
Summary: Great Tool
Review: I am a graduate student with the University of Denver and I used this book to develop an online community. It is a superb resource to help you work through building an online community from the ground up, while at the same time helping you to maintain focus. No nonsense, easy to navigate. Indespensable.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent design guide
Review: I believe everyone has a heart - whether in social or business settings - and that most people warms up to sensible "human touches" in a mechanistic environment created with computer-based systems. Amy Jo Kim's book is a strategy book written with a little humor and a great understanding of what people crave in a community (note "community" and not "transaction") - to belong, to interact and to be empowered. She gives many practical tips on how to attract and engage people in cyberspace. At no time did Ms Kim give the impression that this book is supposed to be a step-by-step instructional manual.
Rating:
Summary: In the Online Community industry, this book's the BIBLE!!
Review: I have read several books and articles on online communities and no other source comes close to Amy Jo's book! I found "Community Building on the Web" so wonderful because it's 1) extremely easy to understand 2) comprehensive 3) supplemented by excellent case examples and 4) actually a joy to read! Whereas I keep all of my other Community books around to reference on a topic or two, I recommend a page-to-page reading of Kim's book... it's quite simply the bible for Community Manager's like myself.
Rating:
Summary: Build it Like London and Not Like Paris!
Review: I have spent the last seven years making every mistake that Amy Jo warns us against making for ourselves. She does an amazing job at encapsulating what is an unfocused and uncoordinated new world of Virtual Community Building, a world wherein most everyone is bumbling around, just making it up as they along. It doesn't have to be that way! When I started MemeSpace.org, and years before Amy Jo's book was published, I designed it in the same way L'enfant did: I built a Grand City and then policed it and enforced focus and seriousness and discipline! Oh, was a boring and sad place, what a large desolate place! I discovered myself that one must build a Virtual Online Community Organically, in much the same way that London was formed from a small Village. Not like Paris, mostly planned from the ground up. And a VC should be a place of play, creativity, and exploration (self-exploration as well as others). I learned my lessons the hard way. When I pre-ordered Amy Jo Kim's book and then received it, I pored over it and realized that I could have saved myself a lot of time and bad blood if I had had a book like this when I started. If you want to smoothly design, build, and enjoy a powerfully dynamic and intimite VC, read this book thrice. And buy some for your Facilitators, Managers, and Organizers. If you are a masochist and want it to be an uphill battle, then don't!
Rating:
Summary: Review of Community Building on the Web
Review: I liked the way the premis of the book could be used to promote any community. "People are no different in cyberspace." Ms. Kim has had diverse experience leading groups including AOL chat rooms, technical-support, history and sophisticated gaming sites. She is clear at the start that the purpose of the book is not hardware or software issues but people. Despite the thoroughness, her writing remains fresh. "If everyone likes what you're doing, you're probably not doing it right." I consider this book as a must have for anyone working in web site design and of interest to those who want know how the World Wide Web is evolving.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I thought this was an excellent book. Even though technologies change the concepts presented in this book are timeless.
Rating:
Summary: Best book by far for online community building
Review: I'm an independent consultant on interactive technologies and web community building. I've read a number of books and articles giving advice about online communities, and none comes close to matching Amy Jo Kim's. Her book is the most exceptional in integrating human and technical considerations; describing how sites can launch, expand and evolve; giving lots of first-hand examples; and being an easy, fun read. I get the sense from her Naima company site that she's on the leading edge for design and technical approaches. I'm personally working now with communities for performing artists and software developers. This book is the only one I'm willing to carry with me on all my customer consulting visits.
Rating:
Summary: Best book by far for online community building
Review: I'm an independent consultant on interactive technologies and web community building. I've read a number of books and articles giving advice about online communities, and none comes close to matching Amy Jo Kim's. Her book is the most exceptional in integrating human and technical considerations; describing how sites can launch, expand and evolve; giving lots of first-hand examples; and being an easy, fun read. I get the sense from her Naima company site that she's on the leading edge for design and technical approaches. I'm personally working now with communities for performing artists and software developers. This book is the only one I'm willing to carry with me on all my customer consulting visits.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful, Interesting and Fun Read on Web Interactions
Review: I've ordered a good many books from Amazon, and 'til now never felt the slightest urge to write a review. This is a useful and entertaining book from its dedication (check it out) to its epilogue. The quality of the writing is leagues beyond standard computer book prose, and the book is crammed with examples that are illuminating and interesting. The writer is really plugged in. The main point I want to make, though, is you don't have to be a Web "professional" to enjoy and learn from this book. If you care about how the Web works, you'll better understand its significance as a multipoint communications medium and have new information about how to use it more effectively after reading this. (Even if you didn't care about how the Web works, you'd find good stuff here about communities and communication dynamics.) And you'll have a good time while you're reading. Hard to ask for more.
Rating:
Summary: Just what I needed!
Review: My website has been up since 1995, but only in the last couple of years has started being a real community. I knew there were a lot of things that I wasn't addressing that would make the community more coherent. I've been a member of a few of the communities that Ms. Kim profiles, but being a community member doesn't necessarily give you insight into being a community leader. I'm very impressed with this book. I got a great idea for my site from it the first day I read it, which is to create a "Welcome Wagon" page for the site. It seems so obvious now, but somehow I had never thought of it. I put a page up on my site for new people, and it's one of the most highly trafficked pages on the site. Community Building on the Web is full of useful ideas that you can apply to your community. The writing is clear and straightforward, and the thinking behind the suggestions is thoroughly explained. Ms. Kim also addresses much of the psychology behind what makes a community work, which I found very helpful in generating new ideas of my own. This is one of the most valuable books I've bought in my career as a website creator.
| 
