I wonder if it happens to everyone this way. I’ve had two interesting experiences lately:
- Overwhelming sense of not seeing the connections in my RSS and getting fed up with too many similar types of posts or posts that don’t mean alot to me
- Twitter rejection – I tried to follow someone who I thought would have most of the answers but they didn’t want me
So to clarify what I was learning from all these people I’ve reorganised my RSS and in the process revisited a lot of blogs, gone back into the history, checked resources and found out their names. The names thing was especially important for me as you read a lot of comments and it can be difficult to put the comments in perspective. I think after doing this exercise I have a much better understanding of who the people are in my network and where to go for different types of information. Not only does this make me feel more connected to my community as a reader and watcher it helps me understand when I can most usefully participate in the conversation (or something like that).
In the process I created this mind map to help me understand. It’s a work in progress. You’re welcome to join me. MindMeister is collaborative so I can share my mind map with you if your interested. Also I’d be really interested if other people have people they trust and go back to time after time
Other resources for understanding your network:
Other writings about networks
- Musings about social and g/local cultures
- Rhizomes and blogging – public/private groupwork and the establishment of trusted nodes
- The Techne-mentor
- Forrester’s New Social Technolographics report
- 6 Degrees of Professional Development
