Most people know Geocities for it's chatting environment but if this is all you have seen of geocities then you're missing out. Type www.geocities.com into your browser and you'll arrive to a display with "members" in the top right hand corner where webmasters go to take care of their websites. At the centre of the screen there is a topic of the day and by clicking on it you get to member pages about the topic, from here you arrive into an interesting area. This area consists of people like you, your friends, or anyone else you know because anyone who ever felt like creating a website may do so. If you enjoy snowboarding you may type personal snowboarding sites and find many sites by people interested in the same thing of you, reading about equipment, experiences etc and so getting to know people across the globe.
On a more academic side you may like to find out more about a certain author such as Leo tolstoy so you type that into the geocities search engine and you'll find a group of sites, some of which are personal opinions while others are quotes and electronic texts. As you search you find out something you may have never know or you find some personal letters biographies and links to other sites and so as you continue to search you get up to a certain point where you find authors that influenced him, which copied him etc. therefore getting a good underrstanding of who he was and if you're really interested you could start talking to someone in another part of the world with the same interest in that topic of you.
Conclusively the online community is like the Café in paris or the forums in Rome, people come from all over to talk to people about things and make friends with people whom they may never have met otherwise. It enables information to be passed to the whole world within a few seconds. It is one of the miracles of the twentieth century.
Article by Richard Azia
[Surfing the World Wide Waves]