Anne Truitt Zelenka

I got Ronald Burt’s Bokerage & Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital from Amazon last week, so I can stop quoting from John Hagel and start quoting directly. I’ve only read the first 20 pages, but I’m already afloat in ideas from it. Great book–and so applicable to the blogging world.

One of the most interesting points Burt makes in those first 20 pages is that the usefulness in terms of information brokerage of someone’s social network cannot be measured by the number of relationships they have. That’s because if a person increases their number of relationships within a given cluster of people sharing views and information they haven’t added any new flows of information. Burt says this: “Instead of seeing people as the source of information, clusters are the source and people are ports of access to the information that circulates around them.”

I was surprised when I started my two new jobs last fall at Web Worker Daily and RedMonk how quickly I was flooded with redundant information in those two domains… and how dull that was. If you subscribe to a hundred or more feeds, you probably see the same information and ideas coming up again and again, just with slightly different twists. That’s because any blogging about a particular domain–knitting, mothering, celebrity news, SOA–is a cluster unto itself.

So that’s interesting, but this is even more interesting:

Experiments with small networks show that people find it difficult to see a structural hole, expecially if their own network contains none… People experienced with structural holes more quickly identify the holes in a new situation, so they can target brokerage opportunities to create value.

This almost perfectly describes what happens regularly with certain subclusters of the web technology community. Those who are firmly fixed within a certain cluster and don’t have any relationships with people outside that cluster fail to see that they’re missing opportunities for fresh ideas and innovation. They are blind to the information gaps–but the information gaps are exactly the direction in which the greatest opportunities for change and progress lie.