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November 29, 2005
Who's In Your Network?
A brief bit of theory to preface a bit of news: It's not what you know, it's how you're networked (or not). I know that if i wanted a date in Brazil, I'd look first to the people I'm networked with at Orkut. I know that if I wanted to get in touch with marketing people, I'd look first to the people I'm networked with at LinkedIn. If I needed another body in a double date to a punk rock concert, I'd check out my niece's spot at MySpace. You just can't meet people in bars like they do in the movies. Clues are all online. I feel sorry for the clueless.
So I'm fortunate to have more than 1000 pageviews a day here at Cobb, but even more fortunate that I get unsolicited email some of which is not spam. So today a thoughtful individual sent me an article about some heads in Africa that I ought to pay attention to. I published 'Africans Whom Westerners Should Heed' over at the Brotherhood site. And believe me, when I get my national game in order, I'm not even going to forget the international.
As a computer scientist, it has taken me some time to learn things that I imagine my peers in the Arts & Letters have learned some time ago. It hasn't been easy work making sense of social networks - we in the computer industry have built ours from scratch. If I were an attorney, I would have known 30 years ago, even before college that in Los Angeles, the place to be was O'Melveny & Myers. I knew a kid with the right last name. But in the new world of distributed communications, aggregations of power move much quicker than law firm addresses. Not everybody is playing in that world and it is not yet invested with all the power it will acquire. It's growing. But this is how I get in touch, circles of trust, networks of interest, peer groups in public and private online communities. It allows me to be in many places at once, and for those who can master the paradigm, it's a very enabling tool indeed.
Such networks will never fully replace, but they will facilitate and augment meeting people face to face. Oh what a world, what a world!
Posted by mbowen at November 29, 2005 03:01 PM
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