The real key to communities: connecting on and offline.(influence of online social networking on...

Byline: Steve Rubel

Community is the glue that unites us all as humans. It has for thousands of years and mostly via offline venues.

More recently, thanks to the rise of Web 2.0, communities are becoming an equally huge part of our online lives. Technology and broadband are giving rise to thousands of micro global villages where people find each other, talk and collaborate around shared interests or goals. Where there's an interest, there's a community.

This isn't a new idea, of course. When I was a teenager in the mid-1980s, I spent hours on the