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Ever since coined the term in his 1993 book of the same name, people have been arguing about it. In those early days, some social theorists and academics worried that people who engaged in building communities online would turn their backs on their "real" communities. A prominent and widely publicised research study in the late 90's suggested that online community membership did exactly that: it dragged people away from what the authors felt was more meaninful face to face engagement with the offline communities around them (although it should be noted that the findings were several years later).

The argument about the value, or negative consequences of, online community raged until 2000 when made it into the Business Week top ten business books of the year, convincing a legion of business leaders and consultants that "markets are conversations" and online community was the way to tap into those conversations.

In the same year an email group for online community managers, e-mint, formed and started holding regular meetings in London. has since formalised as the International Association of Online Community Managers and has over 500 members on it's email discussion list. Nowadays, the public perception of online communities is that, well, they're everywhere and just about anyone who is online is a part of at least one online community, whether it's a cc list on an email used by friends to organise a night out, a dating website, a work based project wiki, or a photo sharing site like .

It's at a meeting of e-mint in London where I caught up with Seattle's who is widely recognised as a leading online community expert. I first met Nancy at an online writing in 2000 and again at four years later and wanted to find out how, in her view, the very idea of online community had changed during the ten years she's been involved in the industry. I also wanted to hear her thoughts on how changes in the tools used to build online community, from message board forums and email discussion lists in the past to, more recently, blogs and social networking sites like myspace, had changed the role of the professional online community manager.

You can listen to Robin's interview with Nancy White