Jon Udell on Seeing and Tuning Social Networks:

A number of people are starting to say that the 'W's'--Web services, web logs, and WiFi (wireless connections) are starting to make the web, which was in danger of becoming a big consumer mall, fun again.

So what is some of the current thinking on web logs, social networking, economics, and the web? Udell talks to Jon Schull, a biological psychologist turned software entrepreneur, and Valdis Krebs, a developer of software for mapping social networks.

Jon Schull thinks we ought to be looking at patterns of nature and agriculture rather than commerce and manufacturing to understand the way the web works, how things travel, and to find new ways to handle intellectual property and the spread of knowledge.

Valdis Krebs says information travels at most three 'hops' (person to person to person). The most effective organizations, then, are those with the most reach (richest interconnections). Companies who handle change best are those with high reach and leaders adept at plugging holes (making connections where they don't currently exist).