John Battelle (who has an excellent blog on Search) has an interesting idea: LinkedIn+Vertical Blogs = Interesting Microcommunities.
I think it’d be cool if you could join a network of folks who read the same blog(s). I’ve always maintained that any good publishing effort understands and reflects its community – that it is both a mirror to the community members, and a window into that community for folks who are interested in joining or understanding that community. Conferences have always been a neat way for readers of a publication to meet each other, for example. Foo Camp was one of the first I’ve been to where “blog ecologies” ended up meeting FTF, and it was quite something to see how folks who’d been connected mainly by blogs ended up working together in real space.
So think if you could “see” all the other people who read this site each day (and who opt-in to be seen, of course) – and invite them into a LinkedIn like network if you wished to. I wonder if that’s in the cards for LinkedIn – to do vertical OEM stuff like that? Are there others working on stuff like this?
Would be nice to do this around my blog…wonder how we can do it.