I find myself fascinated by the posts that Tom Mandel has written on open email as social networking here and here. While I was in college, back in the pre-Internet, pre-PC days, I worked as an editorial assistant at a magazine, a job that entailed transcribing, typing, and distributing reams of interoffice memos, not to mention handling, reading, filing postal mail for senior editors. This was considered a prime job because of the opportunity to immerse yourself in the editorial business via the correspondence of experienced professionals. Thus it was with interest I read Tom’s posts about tagging email and open email servers that would allow for the spread of the “tacit knowledge” of which “email is chock full.” So true.

It also occurred to me when reading the wide variety of posts here that the networks we are talking about differ in two big ways — one is what I will call the value chain. I’ve written about this before, and essentially it is the notion that for any network you can follow the creation of value as it moves from node to node. Another main point of difference is the nodes themselves. In Tom’s posts, he postulates a network where email and conversation threads are the nodes. In other posts on this blogs, nodes under discussion include people, views and transactions, services, energy networks.

Not that this is an all-inclusive list, by any means. Simply an illustration of what I’m coming to see as building blocks of social networks — nodes and value.