My partner Jeff is in Mexico for a couple of weeks. Caught him in IM last night, where he sent me a pointer to his image gallery for the trip. You can count on Jeff to shoot everything in sight. He's in the mountains between San Miguel de Allende and Mexico City, visiting S.O. Irma's family. These images were uploaded via dialup, which shows the kind of dedication that makes Jeff such a great network wrangler.

Our nutty friends at Adbusters want you to buy nothing today, but we know better, of course. And while you're busy buying nothing, check out this cool new book at the Taschen site: Japanese Graphics Now!

(BTW I wasn't going shopping today, but I might hit the mall just to be contrarian...)

The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.

Not just making it, but giving it away. Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.

Which may be why the media haven't quite gotten the magnitude of what's happening here: It's not about investments. If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything's a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool.

George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six years in Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the same to America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit, diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans.

The question seems to be whether there's a business model for social network sites, which build followings by attracting, not just individuals, but the networks of friends and colleagues they tend to bring with them. The sites offer various ways for members to find each other, interact, and potentially have productive association that extend relationships, whether in business, romance, or just friendship.

The Internet, which is a scale-free network, tends to support the formation of scale-free social networks. Using the Internet over many years, I know I've come to perceive networks everywhere more readily, evolving a world-view that focuses on links, connections, nodes, and hubs. In the Scientific American article linked above, the authors demonstrate that scale-free networks are pervasive, so the various business entities forming around social networks are finding ways to facilitate what's inherent and capture profits from the resulting numbers.

I've joined five of the social network sites, and I visit four of them fairly regularly. Though the broad premise behind each site is the same, each is a little different in its approach and functionalities. Since I'm kind of a mad networker, I know a lot of people, and each site has a different combination of people I know. There are a handful of people I communicate via Tribe.net, for instance, and I do enough business networking via Ryze to justify a gold membership.

I assume that people will use many such sites in many ways, and those of us who do communications consulting already suggest ways to leverage network effects within organizations using social as well as software affects. There's also political potential in social networks. The Howard Dean campaign has set up its own social network site, called Deanlink.

Meanwhile, come people just don't get it:

Ms. Lee (sic?) of Forrester Research says her main concern with social networking sites is their ability to retain users. “Unless I am actively looking for a job or date, I have no reason to go there” she says. However, there’s more chance that people would return to the major portals if they had their own social networking services. “Portals like MSN, AOL, or Yahoo are part of my daily habit,” she says.