Interviewed for article on Web community in .net magazine

Issue 165 of .net magazine (August 2007) includes a feature by Jason Walsh on social uses of the Web, entitled ‘Build the perfect web community’, for which I was interviewed, along with Jeff Roberto of Friendster, Kevin Rose of Digg.com, Tom Coates of Yahoo!, Christian Ward of Last.fm, Andrew Calcutt from the University of East London, and David Gerard of Wikipedia. Among my comments, which somewhat contradict the thrust implied by the title of the piece, I note that “People are wary of real-life encounters due to a decline in trust“ and “Online communities are not communities in a real sense”. The article is not available online, but the magazine is worth buying for anyone interested in Web design and development. (Having purchased the first issue in the mid-90s I was pleasantly surprised to see how it has evolved. And unlike many computing-related titles, it is well designed.)