From David Lazer, a little diffusion experiment I am happy to participate in. If you want to join in, and you have a blog or website, you can click "Spread It" to get the code.

(You may need to move the scroll bar down a bit to see and then grab the network image, which is the state of the diffusion at my posting time)







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One of the most insightful practitioners of social/organizational network analysis is Valdis Krebs, who has until now been blogging exclusively on Network Weaving, with June Holley and Jack Ricchiuto. On Sunday, Valdis announced that he is moving his posts that relate to concepts and thinking about "economies, organizations, communities and groups" to a new blog, TNT - The Network Thinker. This promises to be one of my "must reads" on my Bloglines feed.

As an added bonus, Valdis moved to this blog his posts on Network Weaving over to TNT. So the new blog has a lot of good tidbits, posts I had seen originally but that always bear a re-read. One was his posted reference to an article and podcast by Herminia Ibarra, professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. The article is a rich and succinct summary of the importance of networking for successful managers.

Ibarra summarizes three distinct types of networks:

• Organizational. This is the set of people we rely on to get work done. Most managers who attend courses at INSEAD have accomplised organizational networks.
• Personal. This is the set of people who are "discretionary" contacts, people that make our networks diverse and let us extend ourselves into new areas of learning and social activity. Personal networking is often "an afterthought" for busy managers.
• Strategic. These networks are the toughest to build and maintain but the most important for managers who what to be business leaders. The people in this network are peers and senior managers outside your company and beyond your industry who can help you learn new approaches in management, keep tabs on new developments, and see the bigger picture.

The article is extracted from a podcast that is definitely worth downloading and listening to (more than once).

I've been cleaning up my tags in del.icio.us lately (preparing for a demo) and really thinking hard about tagging. I like word clouds a lot, and just came across wordle. Here's the tag cloud for mydelicious:


You can see that I've been preoccupied with enterprise 2.0 lately... especially looking for enterprise 2.0 software products that create social graphs. I didn't see many at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.