I wasn't exactly over the moon when I found out that my subject for this year's catalogue was to be Virtual Communities. Everybody was talking about them In 1997/98. But Is that still the case? In 1999? In the meantime, the concept has degene­ rated into a hollow term, which may be Ideal for upgrading business plans but not much else. The term “ virtual communi­ ties" was popularised by Howard Rhein- gold in 1993 in his book of the same name. It originally documented the hope for an extension of the public sphere in cyberspace and there was something re­ freshing about that hope and the naive, optimistic faith in technical progress it embodied. But then the term became vul­garised.