As I was preparing to come home from my Mother’s day trip to visit my Mom in Wisconsin, I caught a bit of Good Morning America (GMA) out of the corner of my eye while chatting with my Mom. Right there, in living rooms across America, a Tory Johnson provided career hints for “boosting your online profile”:

• Join LinkedIn to get a sense of your network and job possibilities
• Write reviews of books on Amazon.com to boost your visibility
• Write a blog

Now, my Mom is not likely to do any of these things. When I arrived on Friday, she was burning with the question, “What is Google?” and although I was able to show it to her on my brother’s home computer, she declined my offer to teach her how to use it. Still, a quick and interesting insight into how our language and our tools are seeping into the mainstream.

This morning, catching up on email, I caught a posting by Valdis Krebs to the INSNA SOCNET list. Yahoo! has hired social network researchers, including Duncan Watts who wrote Six Degrees. Working at Yahoo! research, Watts is interested in “trying to understand how social networks and communities evolve over time, how people influence each others’ behavior and how people find things that are useful.”

Certainly GMA helps many find things that are useful. And, for those interested in applied research on community development in conjunction with technology, there’s the upcoming Communities and Technologies conference. John Smith and Lauren Klein, colleagues from CPsquare and elsewhere, are giving a workshop on coaching community leaders.