One idea that I’ve been focusing a lot on these days is Social Capital. It is one of those popular phrases that doesn’t get explored enough. Blogs and online social networks are a way of building social capital, and people wonder how to transform some of that social capital into economic capital; not an easy task.

In Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, he provides a little more insight into social capital. He divides it into bonding social capital and bridging social capital. Bonding social capital is what ties a community together. Members of a community share a common bond, they talk about it and it empowers them. Bridging social capital is how people reach out to other communities and connect them.

People often criticize the blogosphere as being high in bonding social capital and low in bridging social capital. The lefties bond with the lefties and the same thing happens on the right. I’ve always thought of it in terms of the second degree of friends in an online social network. A person focused on bridging social capital may have lots of friends, and one on bonding social capital may have a smaller number, but even if they have the same number, it becomes more apparent when you go to friends of friends. With bonding social capital, they are all friends of one another and the number of friends of friends isn’t substantially different from the number of friends. However, for bridging social capital the difference can be great.

However, this is based on an incomplete view of social networks. Two of the key components of a network are the nodes; people in the case of social networks, and links; relationships in the case of social networks. A third component of any network is the traffic over the network; the communications between people in a social network.