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For years I've been singing the praises of niche outreach and waiting to see niche social networking overtake general social networks (like Facebook) with the public. I'm sad to say it hasn't happened as quickly as I would have liked. Too many people are still wasting too much time trying to be everything to everyone. That said, niche social networking is here, and it's been around much longer than some of you probably realize. Let's explore niche social networking, what might be holding it back, and where things are going well for niche social networks.

"The ability to network successfully can be one of the greatest assets in business. It allows some people to find incredible opportunities, while others just watch from the sidelines. Effective networking isn't a result of luck -- it requires hard work and persistence. What does it take to be a super networker? Here are seven of the most important habits to develop:"

"PPT discusses how to use social collaboration to re-energize your workforce and optimize your core business processes with purpose driven collaboration. Learn how to streamline problem solving, execute faster and drive rapid decision making to achieve your core operational and financial performance metrics. Learn how The Transformational Opportunity from Social Collaboration will come from closing Business Loops: - Customer Performance = Traditional CRM + Customer Networks - Talent Performance = Talent Management + Talent Networks - Financial Performance & Risk Mitigation = Financial Management + Performance Networks - Supply Chain Performance = Supply Chain Management + Business Networks "

"Virtually everywhere one looks we are in the midst of a transition for how we organize and manage information, indeed even relationships. Social networks and online communities are changing how we live and interact. NoSQL and graph databases - married to their near cousin Big Data - are changing how we organize and store information and data. Semantic technologies, backed by their ontologies and RDF data model, are showing the way for how we can connect and interoperate disparate information in ways only dreamed about a decade ago. And all of this, of course, is being built upon the infrastructure of the Internet and the Web, a global, distributed network of devices and information that is undoubtedly one of the most important technological developments in human history. There is a shared structure across all of these developments - the graph. Graphs are proving to be the new universal paradigm for how we organize and manage information. Graphs have an inherently expandable nature, and one which can also capture any existing structure. So, as we see all of the networks, connections, relationships and links - both physical and informational - grow around us, it is useful to step back a bit and contemplate the universal graph structure at the core of these developments. Understanding that we now live in the Age of the Graph means we can begin studying and using the concept of the graph itself to better analyze and manage our interconnected world. Whether we are trying to understand the physical networks of supply chains and infrastructure or the information relationships within ontologies or knowledge graphs, the various concepts underlying graphs and graph theory, themselves expressed through a rich vocabulary of terms, provide the keys for unlocking still further treasures hidden in the structure of graphs."

We feel the need to belong, to form a part of a group who make us feel wanted, and loved and understood. And what better place to do that than the Internet? We're not suggesting you stop going out more often, but there are increasing signs of "like-minded" individuals e-huddling together and carrying out activities which are of common interest, and this is where niche social networking steps in.  By targeting a specific audience, a niche social networking site is able to create an automatic bond between people

Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month. Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?

Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration meets this challenge head on with a systemic, human-network approach to managing business operations and ecosystems.

"Lee Rainie will present a keynote discussion on networked learning at the The Free Learning 2.0 Conference on August 22. The conference is "a unique chance to participate in a global conversation on rethinking teaching and learning in the age of the Internet.""

In the knowledge economy, content is no longer sufficient - everyone has access to a multitude of content. You cannot compete on what everyone knows. As you move up the hierarchy, it becomes more difficult to compete on individual competency - everyone is highly skilled and experienced at the top. It is hard to compete when everyone is so similar. The new advantage is context - how internal and external content is interpreted, combined, made sense of, and converted to new products and services. Creating competitive context requires social capital - the ability to find, utilize and combine the skills, knowledge and experience of others, inside and outside of the organization. Social capital is derived from employees' professional and business networks. The new competitive landscape requires focusing on between-employee factors, the connections that combine to create new processes, products and services. Social capital encompasses communities of practice, knowledge exchanges, information flows, interest groups, social networks and other emergent connections between employees, suppliers, regulators, partners and customers.

AMHERST, Mass. - As computer scientists this year celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the mathematical genius Alan Turing, who set out the basis for digital computing in the 1930s to anticipate the electronic age, they still quest after a machine as adaptable and intelligent as the human brain. Now, computer scientist Hava Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an expert in neural networks, has taken Turing's work to its next logical step. She is translating her 1993 discovery of what she has dubbed "Super-Turing" computation into an adaptable computational system that learns and evolves, using input from the environment in a way much more like our brains do than classic Turing-type computers. She and her post-doctoral research colleague Jeremie Cabessa report on the advance in the current issue of Neural Computation. "This model is inspired by the brain," she says. "It is a mathematical formulation of the brain's neural networks with their adaptive abilities." The authors show that when the model is installed in an environment offering constant sensory stimuli like the real world, and when all stimulus-response pairs are considered over the machine's lifetime, the Super Turing model yields an exponentially greater repertoire of behaviors than the classical computer or Turing model. They demonstrate that the Super-Turing model is superior for human-like tasks and learning.

How do you manage a workforce that is both nomadic and collaborative? In a 24/7 always-on- and-interconnected world, do we need to rethink the industrial-workplace social contract that's based on hours worked and being on-the-job ? Join Harold Jarche to discuss how these and other trends mean a shift to perpetual Beta, where learning is the work.

As the fundamental flow of energy through the marketplace transforms from 'push' to 'pull,' organizations will need to become more active and participative social networkers.  New opportunities will show up first on the myriad of non-structured, social media sites that cater to people who want to collaborate to solve problems, start trends, influence the masses and build support.

Will the upsurge in activity around climate change and the food crisis repeat the cycle of the movement of movements over the past decade - momentary visibility then dissolution? Harry Halpin and Kay Summer say 'yes', unless different models of organising are embraced.

3D printers, sensor networks, virtual humans and other technologies under development now will drastically change our world in the decade to come, according to Cisco chief futurist Dave Evans

I like this article. It is forward thinking and visionary.

Worldwide social network ad revenues will reach $5.54 billion this year, eMarketer estimates, with just under half that amount, $2.74 billion, coming from the US market.

Although we learn every day, in everything we do, whether it is in what we read, watch or listen to, or in the conversations and discussions we have with other people, at some time people started believing that the only important learning happens in a formal setting, e.g. in a school classroom or a university lecture hall.

The Net, especially working and learning in networks, subverts many of the hierarchies we have developed over hundreds of years. Formal education is one example, as shown in this excellent article by Cathy Davidson: