It still requires that one has the interpersonal skills in order to leverage that data, especially if the participant has business objectives their seeking to accomplish. I can see a whole segment of professionals scraping their knees as they blurt out analytical data in socially awkward ways.

Similarly, all the social skills in the world don’t matter if you don’t know where to plug yourself into the conversation!! I’m going to check out some of the links you posted here.

Thanks for sharing this insightful perspective, Francisco!

The first, the basic behavior of groups of people and benefiting from that behavior, which is typically perceived by users via things like ratings, # of times something is accessed, etc. But this leaves the user to apply a lot of eye balling to get the most value across multiple samples, say across social networks, blogs, forums, etc: how is the BMW 7 series rated among many of these. Man, that’s a lot of work. I don’t know about you, but that is hard, I don’t have time for that. But it is what it is, yeah, we can aggregate etc, but it still takes a lot of eye balling. Can this be automated? Yup, but it’s freaking hard.

The second, is applying this social intelligence to benefit end users of business applications. No, not managers, who cares about them I’m talking about the grunt loosing sleep trying to make deadlines or achieve their sales quota. Take a look at what we are doing at Oracle’s Social CRM Applications (http://blogs.oracle.com/socialcrm/2008/07/social_intelligence.html). The basic premise is that we CAN apply business intelligence (BI) to analyze past behaviors and provide that to end users so they can do something with it. So what? I say. Well, how about applying similar BI tech for predictive analytics to help guide users in what ever decision they are going to take, say follow a sales lead, or purchase a product? That’s pretty cool ’cause the rep doesn’t have to hunt down stuff, it’s served up to them, a huge time savings and s/he benefits from the crowd (http://blogs.oracle.com/socialcrm/2008/07/why_sales_reps_are_social.html). But, why stop there, that’s just business intelligence!!!! Isn’t it? Well, how about capturing the here and now, that’s something that BI can’t capture because it generally requires a lot of data to spot patterns and trends. How about if the predictive engine took into account anecdotal knowledge of the users of the social web to add value to the users? An example is taking into account current events, such as the California fires to sell more insurance, or Katrina a few years ago to sell more flood insurance that the predictive engines would completely miss? Now, you’re talking…the sum of business analytics + predictive analytics + anecdotal social knowledge = social intelligence…in computer speak, not psychological speak such as Daniel Colman points out in his book…I’m not psychologist, but I can use computers to do the dirty work for me w/o all that studying so I can benefit from Social Network behavior without getting tired of reading endless amount of info on the Social Web

- contributing to open source is probably the best way for engineers to build portfolio, to make more money (and if it’s not the best way, then the best way is having built something that makes a ton of money)

- wikipedia exists because jimmy wales a) is smart and b) was trying to get rich (and/or laid) by doing something valuable (in terms of social or financial capital)

sex = ultimate social capital
profit = ultimate financial capital

i salute you, mr. diggles!

pull the plug on the web – and this truth will remain.