The Washington Post reports that schools in and around the US capital are warning pupils to be careful what they write or what pictures they post to teen-friendly social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Xanga because prospective employers or college admissions tutors could be reading. For more see Teens' Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools.

I recommend a really insightful article in The Best Software Writing (I) by Clay Shirky entitled A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (April 2003) which takes good look at the design of social software in its widest sense - in other words any form of virtual community or collaboration system. Clay shares, from practical hard-earned experience, three things we must accept and four things we must design for if we want to create systems which are actually useful.

Digital Reputation and Social Networking Systems are currently very hot but have you ever wondered about their philosophical roots. They are actually embodiments of the two mechanisms by which we humans can know about someone or something according to the Philosopher Bertrand Russell: Acquaintance and Description.

Microsoft Research tool sorts your email inbox by importance

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best – in this case automatically ‘triaging’ inbound email by user defined importance. SNARF allows the user to design their own personal email importance criteria such as the "number of emails sent to me in the last month". Such metrics can, in turn, be combined to create overall importance criteria for sorting your inbox.

Creative innovation needs social networks not just neural networks

We often have in our head the stereotype of the brilliant but solitary artist or writer who cannot, or will not, work with anyone else but is this the whole story on creativity and innovation?

An essay by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian shows why it is important to have good friendship rings as well as strong social/business networks and how to tell the difference between the two.

A crowd draws a crowd but you need to be fit too

Albert Laszlo Barabasi in his excellent book "Linked - the New Science of Networks" lets us into a secret about how networks grow. Relatively new research has shown that most networks are not random, as previously thought, but "Scale Free" . New nodes in a scale free networks attach themselves to other nodes based on a "preferrential attachment rule" .

Taking your most important relationships seriously

The current focus on ‘social networking’ might make you think you should spend most of your efforts warming up distant relationships and creating new ones. This focus on new relationships is good and healthly – however it would be a major mistake if it meant you neglected to nurture the strong relationships you already have.