Welcome to USC's Annenberg Program on Online Communities. We are a community of scholars, students, and practitioners interested in online communities. As a whole, we are interested in "all things" about the formation and functioning, performance, management, and vision of online communities. Our interests range from social networking to online journalism, from healthcare to the entertainment industry, and from childrent to the aging population. Thus, our students, faculty, and practitioners may focus on the complexities of social networking, nuances of the intellectual property debate, viral transmission of user generated content, the benefits and challenges of illness support groups, the use of online communities in business, marketing, and entertainment, and the challenges faced by the leaders and managers of these efforts and more.

If you are interested in the creation and development of Online Communities, we are here as a resource for you. We will try to keep you (and ourselves) up to date on RESEARCH and on ISSUES IN THE NEWS.

Our Master's degree program is training the next generation of leaders and managers for these communities. We offer a curriculum that will allow you to apply your knowledge of online communities to a variety of professional endeavors.

Our program teams USC's worldclass faculty at the Annenberg School with expert practitioners from around the online communities world. We are excited to introduce to you our academic faculty, our practitioner faculty, and our advisory board.