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Rating: 
Summary: Cyberville readable, highly entertaining
Review: Anyone questioning the relevance of Cyberville as a useful primer on internet culture should be pleased to learn that the book is being used as a core text in a course about cultures and communities in cyberspace at the University of Western Ontario. Don't let the use of Cyberville in an academic setting dissuade you, though. This book is far from your average textbook. Cyberville is an entertaining, highly readable account of author Stacy Horn's experiences with the creation of the online community ECHO. Horn uses a casual approach in detailing many of the issues relevant to online communities, including gender issues, cybersex, and online stalkers. The result is insightful and humourous. Cyberville is reccommended reading for anyone wanting to learn more about online communities. A word of warning, however -- Horn uses many postings from ECHO to illustrate her discussions. These egocentric ramblings from a bunch of self-loathing New Yorkers (especially the frequent examples from a conference entitled "I Hate Myself") are enough to inspire depression in even the cheeriest of individuals.
Rating:
Summary: Better than fiction
Review: Cyberville is a unique book in that it is non-fiction and discusses real people and events. More importantly, interesting people with real views. Horn doesn't shy away from difficult topics and isn't afraid to reveal that she doesn't have all the answers.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring and pretentious
Review: In the technoculture of superficiality, 'community' has becomejust another buzz word, undistinguished in the mad rush to Make MoneyFast on the Internet. Cyberville manages to ignore the commercial mainstream and focus instead on the humans who turn out to be not all that different online than off. That this should be a surprise is remarkable but somehow, the other writers in the cybergenre were too busy looking at the wires to notice.
Rating: 
Summary: It's Cheap, It's New York, It's In the Trenches
Review: Stacy Horn's Cyberville gives a slice of life from the late '80s and early 1990s at the birth of the Internet age.What i like about this book is it gives real world examples of what online communities are like. She has a great philosophy for dealing with troublemakers and funny lists at the end of each chapter that mimic content from EchoNYC. Still quite relevent (and cheap) for any web community development. Jim
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