Here’s an interesting question. Let’s say you use an instant messanger at least once-a-month. How far are you removed from any other person who sent an IM across the network that month?
Leskovec and Horvitz, two researchers at Microsoft, conducted a planetary-wide study of MSN Messenger traffic for a single month (over 180 million users). They [...]

A business can be viewed as a community. As we’ve seen in the past few posts, every community contains social capital within it. What happens when the economy hits a downturn and a company lays-off good people?
The company must balance three types of capital:

Financial capital–cashflow to pay employees, vendors, etc.;
Human capital–experience and expertise; and
Social capital–networks [...]

One of my friends, Dana vanDen Heuvel, recently sent me a link to a very interesting project: Help a Reporter. This project is the brainchild of Peter Shankman.
The premise is simple, and it relies on the “Strength of Weak Ties” with a digital twist.

Reporters/writers go on to “Help a Reporter” and describe the type of [...]

Social networking tools have become commonplace (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.). While these tools allow people to create a surface-level connnection, they are (at best) tools that create very weak ties.
Imagine a network 5,000 people wide. All of those relationships must be shallow. In fact, if you have 5,000 people in your LinkedIn network, you can’t [...]