A real advantage of getting involved in online communities is finding like-minded friends that are perhaps difficult to find in our actual physical communities. Recently, I found just such a 'friend'. She saw my profile in the online community, looked at my interests and my picture and sent me a friend request. In next to no time, I had found out that we were both teachers, we both had degrees in and taught modern languages, we had both been teaching secondary school pupils for about the same length of time, we had similar reading tastes, we both had a blog and, whilst she wasn't a writer and certainly never wrote poetry (as I do), she liked reading poetry - and yet she lived in Italy and I live in the UK. Without going online, we would never have met each other! Once she had learned about my collection of anecdotal poems "It's a Teacher's Life...!", she was amazed. She just didn't think that anyone could write poems about school life, the setting just didn't lend itself to poetry, she thought. But once she read my book, she changed her mind and offered to write a post about me and the book on her blog, which was really wonderful! (If you're interested in seeing what she wrote, you can see it here:
http://flyhigh-by-learnonline.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-blogger-buddies-women-readers.html)

So if you're looking for like-minded people that are difficult to find in 'real' life, get involved in some online communities. You'll never know what will come of it!