Steve Shu's 21Publish Blog

I'm about a third of the way through the book, "The Virtual Handshake" (see blog) by David Teten and Scott Allen, and I find myself bookmarking practically every other page because the book is full of practitioner info, research studies in universities, stories, and unique perspectives from different walks of life.

The topic of the book is opening doors and closing deals online. The book is not targeted at programmers. In the words of the authors:

Our book is particularly relevant to people in roles that depend on relationships: professional investors seeking deals, CEOs seeking business partners, investment bankers seeking capital, salespeople seeking customers, and jobseekers searching for their dream job.

"Quality or Quantity?" is the title of a section in the book concerning personal relationships and networks. This section captures a key value proposition to online technology use. The closing paragraph of the section reads:

"Technology now allows social networks to make a quantum leap forward in breaking the old trade-off between quality and quantity - you can now increase both, without compromising either one," says Contact Network Corporation CEO Geoffrey Hyatt. Learning to write more effective e-mails will help you increase the Strength of your ties, without spending too much time on those relationships. Building a large mailing list similarly allows you to increase the Number without spending significant additional time. Using technology to expand your number of weak ties is a theme we will return to repeatedly in the book.

Does it sound unbelieveable? To be frank, it does on the surface. How one get more of both quality and quantity?

Although not a perfect analogy, I liken the virtual handshake concept to a virtual marble concept that engineers used when inventing the concept of error correcting codes (e.g., Reed Solomon codes) for encoding compact disk information. Fill up a container, say a jar, with marbles. There will be a limit to the number of marbles that can get into the jar. There will be spaces in-between the marbles that constitute deadloss space. One can get more virtual marbles into the space by mathematically allowing the marbles to merge, blend and overlap given certain rules. As it turns out, under certain conditions, there is not a tradeoff between space limitations and the number of marbles one can get into the space (there is a new mathematical bound of course). You can get more of everything by eliminating and better understanding the structure of deadloss space. The rules have changed in some sense.

Concepts are remotely similar (but much more tangible) in the book "The Virtual Handshake". How can you increase quality and quantity of contacts? Though technology. The email concept above is just one of the concepts that may work for you. Or if one is not comfortable with that concept, perhaps there may be twist of the concept or another concept in the book that works for you.

I'll be blogging more about this great book. As a person who hates blogging and email to some extent (this may be a surprise to people), my next topic (Internet Stop 2) will likely highlight some differences between offline and online networking. Stay tuned.