Has been online since 1985 when he set up a local BBS service so that his friends could download pirated video games and leave messages for each other. He has been studying life online since 1995 when he wrote a groundbreaking study of Cybersex Chat on AOL for his MA Thesis. He later went on to obtain an MPhil in Communication Studies and his thesis was on the offline effects of online community membership, again looking at AOL users.
Since then, he has contributed articles to three scholarly edited collections about life online, has been interviewed by print and broadcast journalists in over a dozen countries, and done lectures at universities, conferences, and other venues. Compared to most people working in the online community industry, he claims to have spent a lot of time living online and studying the interactions that people have there.
He has always thought it important to understand users. Who are they? Why do they come online? What do they want to do online? How can we, as community managers, shape the way they interact online so that it satisfies their needs as well as our own commercial needs?