Since last week, I’ve met up with Jack Vinson (who has taken a job in the Boston area and is in the process of moving his family here) from my “greater KM network;” got first time face-to-face connections with John Smith, Bronwyn Stuckey, and Beth Kanter from my CPsquare network; reconnected with colleagues from the UVA Network Roundtable I’ve co-authored articles with (Zeke Wolfberg at the DIA and Vic Gulas of MWH Global); got to spend an hour with the elusive Bruce Hoppe; and had a wonderful morning introducing a small local OD network introduced to me by Nancy Settle-Murphy about Web 2.0. I missed, however, a great meeting of the Boston KM forum (one of my principal local networks) on Web2.0 because I was working under a deadline for an article for a print magazine (how 20th century) on organizational network analysis. Today (also 20th century) I got a copy of the new book, Knowledge Management in Practice, that includes a chapter co-authored by my partner Joe Hutchinson and myself, but that also includes chapters by Boston KM Forum colleagues Larry Chait and Lynda Moulton and by two folks I saw last fall at a Conference Board of Canada KM event, Dave Pollard and Albert Simard.

These activities all brought home to me very powerfully how much Web 2.0 tools have crept into my life and work. I know when Jack is in town because we are fellow travelers on Dopplr. John and I have conversed many times over the course of the 5-year history of CPsquare, and I’ve interacted (only slightly) in the virtual collaboration spaces with Beth and Bronwyn. CPsquare and its practitioner community are on the cutting edge of technologies to support communities. Beth introduced us to her latest method for communicating, her N95, which she used to telecast (live) brief interviews with all of us at dinner. She also posted a photo of my with my book on Flickr, to help generate sales. Communicating in real time.

One of the attractions at the Boston KM forum that I missed was hearing Ray Sims and Jessica Lipnack talk about their Web 2.0 journeys into the “flow.” Especially as I still have much to learn, even though my session with Nancy’s LDR group of OD consultants was quite a success. For people who haven’t yet gone beyond LinkedIn or perhaps put up Facebook pages or possibly thought about blogging, the world running underneath, the social bookmarks, twittering, and I’m not sure what all else, is really an astonishment.

Thus it was that I found it difficult to wrap up my article for Inside Knowledge magazine on “Social Network Analysis Five Years On.” My first published article about SNA/ONA was in that same magazine in May of 2003. To bring the field up to date, I used all my social tools to reconnect with people, and to make new connections. Work in the field has progressed, but is moving quickly as the tools that we use to determine relationships between people and create maps of them are rapidly being embedded into the social tools that we use. The careful methodology of ONA will remain valuable, as it looks at the explicitly declared relationships among people at the level of “who do you turn to when you have a new idea that you want to share?” But the amazing amount of implicit knowledge that we will be able to mine to look at the relationships will alter the way companies think about networks forever. (I invite you to look at my blog post on TheAppGap on this topic.)

Yours truly (swirling in the flow).