My partner Jeff is in Mexico for a couple of weeks. Caught him in IM last night, where he sent me a pointer to his image gallery for the trip. You can count on Jeff to shoot everything in sight. He's in the mountains between San Miguel de Allende and Mexico City, visiting S.O. Irma's family. These images were uploaded via dialup, which shows the kind of dedication that makes Jeff such a great network wrangler.

Post-boom a whole new way of working emerges: working for the love of it, giving stuff away. (Thanks, Cory!) [Link]

The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.

Not just making it, but giving it away. Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.

Which may be why the media haven't quite gotten the magnitude of what's happening here: It's not about investments. If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything's a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool.

Red Herring has an interesting piece about social networks as software business. Some of the players are attracting venture capital, but some VCs see social networks as the making of another bubble, which, I suppose, means shiny, empty, and ready to burst at any moment.

The question seems to be whether there's a business model for social network sites, which build followings by attracting, not just individuals, but the networks of friends and colleagues they tend to bring with them. The sites offer various ways for members to find each other, interact, and potentially have productive association that extend relationships, whether in business, romance, or just friendship.

The Internet, which is a scale-free network, tends to support the formation of scale-free social networks. Using the Internet over many years, I know I've come to perceive networks everywhere more readily, evolving a world-view that focuses on links, connections, nodes, and hubs. In the Scientific American article linked above, the authors demonstrate that scale-free networks are pervasive, so the various business entities forming around social networks are finding ways to facilitate what's inherent and capture profits from the resulting numbers.

I've joined five of the social network sites, and I visit four of them fairly regularly. Though the broad premise behind each site is the same, each is a little different in its approach and functionalities. Since I'm kind of a mad networker, I know a lot of people, and each site has a different combination of people I know. There are a handful of people I communicate via Tribe.net, for instance, and I do enough business networking via Ryze to justify a gold membership.

I assume that people will use many such sites in many ways, and those of us who do communications consulting already suggest ways to leverage network effects within organizations using social as well as software affects. There's also political potential in social networks. The Howard Dean campaign has set up its own social network site, called Deanlink.

Meanwhile, come people just don't get it:

Ms. Lee (sic?) of Forrester Research says her main concern with social networking sites is their ability to retain users. “Unless I am actively looking for a job or date, I have no reason to go there” she says. However, there’s more chance that people would return to the major portals if they had their own social networking services. “Portals like MSN, AOL, or Yahoo are part of my daily habit,” she says.

I've converted my weblog from Blogger to Moveable Type. The good news is that there's some cool features in MT: Trackback, Comments, and Categories. The bad news is that there's not a good way in MT to integrate with an email list. There are still enough advantages, though, that I'm going for it. Onward!