Yay for weak ties

Jim Moore's Journal: Reporting on systems evolving :: "Blogs have a special social relevance because they allow their bloggers to create and maintain a network of weak social ties. The network of weak ties that a blogger can sustain is open to all comers, and is potentially vast and highly diverse (as diverse as the web itself--which of couse is not diverse enough, but is more diverse than, say, academic journals). Blogs are weak tie machines! Anyone (you!) can read my blog."

An interesting piece as I reflect on social networks, weak and strong ties today. It comes as a natural outgrowth with being in Geneva for 10 weeks with people I like a tremendous amount, but the question presses gently in the back of my head regarding what happens to those linkages after the completion of one's time here. (It's also relevant with school, considering that the Wilson School MPA program is just 2 years). And the fact that I'm wretched about staying in touch with the people I love, who usually get minimal contact from me other than the occasional email with a nudge to read my blog.

I must admit it also being connected to my ongoing fascination with sociology and social networks. I have been captivated by the online tools which I participate in to varying degrees: blogger of course, friendster, incircle, orkut, hi5, LinkedIn, and more recently, LiveJournal and the facebook. I keep hoping they'll all implode into one company (ideally something more like google, less like microsoft), [yes, I know the evils of monopoly competition, but c'mon, this is a tiny fraction of what's going on out there, and it's not really going to happen]. Still, technorati manages to bridge sites in an interesting way, and OpenID seems to have a promising future.