The classic book on virtual communities is Howard Rheingold's Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (HarperPerennial, 1993). It is available online at www.rheingold.com/vc/book/. The advent of virtual communities and relationships inspired William J. Mitchell, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, to speculate on the impact of the new digital culture on traditional structures of society. You can read his ideas online at www-mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/index.html, or in City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (MIT Press, 1996). In an online community, some information that you normally count on is missing. For example, online you cannot be sure of a person's gender or if an online person is real. Check out the Web site of Virtual Personalities at www.vperson.com/ to learn about Verbots--artificially intelligent entities who are beginning to populate some areas of cyberspace. See also "Bots are Hot" from Wired magazine at www.wired.com/wired/4.04/netbots/index.html.