On the other hand, I DO believe that if you’re doing it in a business context, i.e., “networking”, it should also augment the bottom line. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to tie specific results to specific networking efforts, and attempting to do so is, I believe, a mistake. But the reality is that there are only so many hours in the day that you can spend making social connections. And if you are selective, rather than random, in those efforts, you WILL get more of the kinds of results you want “falling out” of the activity.

Yes, some of the best things that happen (like the multi-million-dollar merger I did that started on a Yahoo Group conversation) are serendipitous. I think a great analogy, though, is scientific discovery, which is also often serendipitous. But as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

That deal was much more likely to happen on the Communities of Practice Yahoo Group than it would have been on Friendster. Given that we have limited time/attention, don’t we want to spend that time in ways that are more likely to produce the results we want? That’s what we’re trying to share with people, and something much of the existing literature on networking hasn’t addressed.

Thanks for your comments!

Just don’t get lost in striving for turning social connectivity into a mechanical, bottom-line-augmenting process. The key here is “serendipity.” Or “syzygy,” if you’d prefer.

“Blog of the Day” is a service to our users as much as to our award-ees. We give the award to new-ish blogs that we think our users would like. I don’t think we ever picked one as new as three days old–though I was enjoying your newsletter even before you “went blog.”
Many of Feedster-users are business bloggers, and another big group are new bloggers, so your entry on “How to become an A-list blogger” hit the jackpot on both counts as something they’d like to see.