RE: trusted networksHarold,

I agree. I use the connections in my social network to filter out the irrelevant and rely heavily on recommendations/links. One challenge is when you go beyond one degree of separation the bond weakens but the value can increase (because the link is new). The problem is that my social network is all in my head and there are few tools to help me optimize it!

For example, blogs are good enough for today but they are really need to change in order to survive. Blogs are becoming so common that they run the danger of becoming another morass of web pages (albeit personalized from the author's point of view) i.e. too much content. At some point you can only read so many blogs, even if you are scanning them.

Blogs are great at allowing the reader to connect to the author but it is difficult for readers to connect to other readers. For example at your blog I can't show my name, it is locked being 'visitor'. How can you or a reader put my comments in context if you do not know who I am? What happens if you/reader want to contact me or at least find out more about me.

If I post a comment the only way to find out if there are replies to it is to return to the site. It is quite difficult to have an ongoing conversation on a blog relating to an entry.

I feel that a blog that I read and like ends up being a dead end on my *social* network. I can't easily expand my network beyond that blog/author node. It may have great content (perfect for my knowledge network) but hard to take it to the next level, the people behind the content. I like what you write about so you're "on my list" but I also want to see what others think for it is that dialogue that produces another level of value, aka the wisdom of groups plus the knowledge of the individual.

That said I like the power of the blog for what it is today. I even started one myself on our company web site:
Ben's Blog

Sincerely,
Ben
Ben's Blogger profile