New UK online magazine.

The Community Herald has been launched as a brand new online publication devoted to all issues impacting virtual communities, with contributions from some of the UK's leading journalists and commentators. The term virtual community was coined by Howard Rhemgold as the title for his eponymously named book on the subject in 1985. As he described there: 'Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace. People who use computers to communicate form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community."

Until now, there has been no publication dedicated to exploring all the issues raised by virtual communities in the 21st century. The Community Herald brings together many of Britain's leading journalists who will be contributing to this new title including BBC presenter Chris Long, The Guardian's Jack Schofield and leading freelance national and computing journalists Guy Clapperton, Danny Bradbury, Wendy Grossman, Huw Collingbourne and Davey Wuider. In the spirit of the new BIogging phenomenon, readers will be able to post immediate feedback and comments to articles thereby providing a unique relationship between journalist and reader. According to Editor Andrew Smith: The purpose of the Community Herald is to provide a unique online destination where people can read, discuss and debate a wide range of issues relating to online communities. The journalists writing for the Community Herald are among the most knowledgeable and experienced observers of the online world. They have been given a free and wide-ranging brief to write about the subjects that they feel most strongly about.