Virtual community online: Why people hang out online

This a very mind opening article on why people hang out online, but what I found most interesting about this article was that after I read this article, my confusions about VC and Real communities are becoming more clear. In the literature review the authors explored the definitions of a virtual community. The term "community" reflects the geographic area and "virtual" indicates the absence of physicality and also the electronic interaction via technology. So the computer mediated communications allows people to come online and communicate their similar interests with each other, with a human touch forming "webs of personal relationships in cyberspace (Rheingold, 1993b, p. 5)" (as cited in Ridings & Gefen, 2004).

However, according to Q. Jones (as cited in Ridings & Gefen, 2004), the virtual gatherings (such as chat rooms)which lack regularity is not considered as a virtual community. From this I gathered that a "virtual community" is where CMC occurs with a regularity in its population (members) whereas the chatrooms are to be equated to maybe parks or the beach in RL, where there is a different set of crowd everyday.

It is starting to make sense to me now :).......thats good news right?

cheers
shaba