In the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed the implosion of many massive financial institutions–such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Morgan Stanley, Merill Lynch, and Lehman.
I’m not going to look at the financial and accounting issues that have driven these events. Let’s set aside discussions of mark-to-market valuation. However, there’s an interesting social capital element [...]

A friend of mine, Dan Hawthorne, tells the following story of his grandmother.
She’d lived a long life, giving generously to those in her family and to her community. She was well loved. When she became ill with cancer, she was surrounded by those same friends and family. She’d deeply invested in relationships with many people [...]

Don Reisinger at TechCrunch wrote yesterday about a social networking study commissioned by European cellphone carrier O2. While the study was informal, it reveals some interesting aha-moments.
The study proposes that within an affinity group, we’re perhaps only three degrees of separation from others within the same affinity group.
Rodrigues finds that we are usually part of [...]

Back in 2001, Thomas Davenport and John Beck released a savvy business book titled The Attention Economy. Some days, I think that marketers learned the wrong lesson from the book. Businesses and advertisers are now encouraging people to monetize their social networks.
Yesterday, Eric Schonfeld, over at TechCrunch, blogged about a new tool called Twittad which [...]