Cyberville: Clicks, Cultures, and the Creation of an Online Town

by Stacy Horn

Book Overview

The founder of Echo, the hippest electronic service around--a new kind of online salon where people who don't know a bit from a byte can go to talk about art, movies, books, and the minutia of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 044651909X
• ISBN13: 9780446519090
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Warner Books (NY)
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

It's Cheap, It's New York, It's In the Trenches

Stacy Horn's Cyberville gives a slice of life from the late '80s and early 1990s at the birth of the Internet age.What i like about this book is it gives real world examples of what online communities are like. She has a great philosophy for dealing with troublemakers and funny lists at the end of each chapter that mimic content from EchoNYC.Still quite relevent (and cheap) for any web community development.Jim

Warm, offbeat look at online life

The nice thing about Stacy Horn's book is that she's able tocapture the variety of online life. Her voice dominates, of course,but the reader gets to hear much of the Echo community living out its online life, in nice big chunks of text. It's a welcome change from your typical dry-as-dust tome about cyber culture.

Good, detailed look at one virtual community

Stacy Horn does a good job of capturing the essense of Echo -- at least in the sense that I really felt like a part of Echo by the time I finished the book, not that I have any experience with Echo. I read this book because I manage virtual communities so I wanted to see how somebody else did it. I think other virtual community managers will enjoy this book, aside from the fact that it's just plain entertaining, because so many of the personality types will be so familiar. We are not alone. We all have our Phils and our Euromans.

Cyberville describes the growth of an online community.

If all you've ever done on the Internet is surf the Web and send Email, you've barely scratched the surface. In Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town, Stacy Horn describes the founding, growth and day-to-day life of Echo, her New York-based online community. This is a story about people, not machines. There is more here about eunuchs than about Unix. Horn started Echo in 1990, her only financing her severance package from Mobil Oil. Cyberville tells about the early settlers of this electronic homestead and how they grew it into a town with heroes, villains, wackos, love, hate, sex (all kinds), death, birth, laughter and tears. The people of Echo don't stay glued to their computers. They bowl and drink and play softball and go to the movies together. Horn follows these face-to-face activities and relates them to the online life these people share. Written in a light and breezy conversational style, Cyberville comes across as a fascinating tale of interesting people settling an uncharted land together.

Cool, compelling.

i couldn't put it down. brings home the experience in dense, funny, entertaining style.