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Knowledge@Wharton has an interview with Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google, in which he highlights the importance of social interaction on the Web:

"So, the killer apps that have really worked on the web have always been about connecting people to one another. So, whether it is instant messaging and e-mail as communications to connect people to one another, whether it's photo-sharing as a way to connect people to one another through photos, or blogging as a way to connect people to one another through the words, people have always been social and the killer apps that have really succeeded on the web have always been social."

Sometimes when I talk with newspaper people about the value of incorporating social networking tools and techniques into their websites, I get the counterargument: Haven't Facebook and Myspace already won that battle?

Today while looking for a screenshot to use in a presentation, I had a devil of a time finding the Augusta, Ga., regional page on Facebook -- even though I'm a member of that network.

Out of desperation I finally played "guess the URL" and managed to find this:

The box at the top says: "Facebook will soon be removing Network Pages from ths site. While you will still be in your current networks, you will not be able to access Network Pages such as this one. ... You can use Groups to connect with the people around you."

These networks -- based first on college/university affiliation, then on regional geography -- have been foundational for Facebook, and this seems like a huge shift, abandoning "people physically near you" as a central discovery model.

Groups might sound like an OK replacement for networks, but they draw no distinction between "where you live" and "people who hate Joe Baloney." Go group-hunting sometime. You'll drown in it.

For those of us operating in the local media space, this may be a small bit of a good news. While local life may be a niche, it's a pretty big and powerful niche just begging to be developed.

Back in the early 1800s a young French writer wrote some observations on the character of American society that I think have something to tell us about how journalists and newspapers should use the Internet.

The writer was Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville, and he wrote Democracy in America, a remarkably clear and astute commentary on the nature of American society.

Consider the era. Most of Europe was ruled by coalitions consisting of aristocratic families, monarchs, and the Roman Catholic church. The French revolution had ended disastrously, as most revolutions do. The unfolding apparent success of the American experiment was no mere curiosity.

De Tocqueville was looking for lessons, and he sought them by using the tools of the reporter. He traveled, he visited, and he interviewed hundreds of Americans.

Occasionally a newspaper journalist will write something arrogant and stupid about the blogosphere today. Such writers should read de Tocqueville carefully. His frank account of the failings of the press, and his carefully hedged defense of freedom of expression, might help one or two newspaper columnists understand that bloggers ultimately are part of the fraternity and not the enemy.

But the parts that I find most compelling have to do with the process of association.

De Tocqueville found the United States to be populated by joiners -- people who spontaneously associated in various types of clubs and groups, formal and informal, as their first response to any sort of challenge.

"If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare and the circulation of vehicles is hindered," he wrote, "the neighbors immediately form themselves into a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to a pre-existing authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned."

In other words, when faced with a problem, Americans get together in groups and solve it. But it's not just about problem-solving; it's about everything.

In his second volume: "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association."

The reason I find all of this interesting and germane to the question of how journalists should use the Internet is simple: I think the ultimate product of journalism is a political product.

By informing, we empower individuals to take an active and participatory role in defining our collective future. Our real product is not the newspaper or the website or the corporate profit margin, but rather a democratic society that works.

If that is our actual goal, how should we use the Internet?

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam cites de Tocqueville and the American practice of forming associations in Bowling Alone, his landmark book on "the collapse and revival of the American community."

Putnam documents a decline in our tendency to form and join associations, and correlates that with a number of depressing statistics including the decline of interest in, and readership of, newspapers. Journalism is part of community, drawing from and contributing to the process.

Democracy works when people have a strong enough web of trust that they are able to work together, and when people have faith that their own actions can make a difference.

Both our trust and our faith are endangered by an array of powerful forces as diverse as entertainment television, the automobile, and the cynical political consultant who seeks to divide us in order that his clients may conquer. As we withdraw from the process of association and pull back from civic life, we suffer both individual and collective setbacks.

But if we understand that as journalists we are participants in this process, and not mere observers (or victims), we may find clues that lead us to an answer to my question.

Print journalists tend to look at the Internet as a publishing platform, a distribution channel that they should adopt only on the principle that "readers" should be able to get "news" in any form they might prefer.

But that misses the salient characteristic of the Internet. It is a network in which all nodes are created equal, and endowed by their creators with with the potential to contribute and participate as well as consume.

This democratizes and transforms journalism from an institution belonging to persons of rank ("professionals") to one that is open to all, and that is disruptive. But it also creates opportunity if we recognize that our goal should be an informed and engaged democratic society that works.

By convening, by leading and facilitating conversational processes, we can feed and reinvigorate the American habit of association that de Tocqueville saw in the 1830s. We can help rebuild the "social capital" that Putnam describes as declining.

But to do this, we have to not only rethink our jobs and recognize the constructive role we play in community. We also must confront some fears. These include fear of technology, fear of our own inadequate skill sets, fear of opinion, and ultimately fear of the "people formerly known as the audience."

And we need to understand the big value of small talk.

There are many ways to fail when convening community, whether online or off.

The abandoned garden represents one kind of failure. A newspaper launches a forum or adds commenting capabilities to its website with no statement of principle, no aspirations other than adding some cheap pageviews, no leadership, no management, and often no rules. The result is chaos and damage.

But the opposite also is possible. Diving into the deep end of the social capital pool also can lead to failure. An empty forum and a failed "citizen journalism" project are as forlorn as an empty restaurant.

To succeed we need, as de Tocqueville described, both the "enormous" and the "diminutive."

Human beings naturally exchange meaningless pleasantries about the weather before engaging in serious conversation. When we seek to build community online, we have to recognize that the small interactions are how we establish the social norms and the trust relationships that can open the door to productive and serious conversation.

The Saguaro Seminar prescribes "150 things you can do to build social capital." Some of them are very small actions. I particularly like "ask neighbors for help and reciprocate." Borrow a shovel, then return it. You've done something very small that can transform a relationship.

Now apply that to the Internet. And heed de Tocqueville's words:

"In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made. ... If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased."

In some ways, we're all multiple personalities based on context.

I am a different person in the context of my family (where, silly me, I imagine myself to be king), in the context of my wife's friends (who think I'm with the CIA because of my mysterious trips out of the country), and in my various professional roles.

So I can completely justify being in multiple social networks with multiple purposes.

But with the explosion of online social networking, I face a multiple-personality problem. How many social networks are too many?

I have 153 friends on Facebook, almost all part of my meandering network of new-media acquaintances. I have 191 professional connections on LinkedIn. I'm involved in several Morris community-networking sites, including a parenting network just launched in Augusta.

And then there's Ning, where Ryan Sholin just launched Wired Journalists, where Robb Montgomery is relaunching Visual Editors, and where I already am a member of the Free Daily Newspaper Association of North America.

Oh, yes: Twitter. I'm not a good twitter-er, so I wired up my blog to post its titles to Twitter, where you can follow me.

If you're my friend on Facebook, do I need to "friend" you on Ning? Do I need to sync my LinkedIn connections? Can't we all just be friends?

[Note: Edited to fix "Visual Editors" and url.]

Mallary Jean Tenore has a piece at Poynter.org titled Journalists Develop, Dismiss Digital Identities that includes the predictable "other side" in which a luddite just doesn't have the time.

In this case the luddite happens to be the "editor/opinion pages" of the Houston Chronicle. That's sad, because it's another example of failure to perceive opportunity.

"Digital identity" is just plain identity. Either people know who you are and what you stand for, or they don't.

The Internet isn't some fringe thing. Every day, more people use the Internet than read daily newspapers. If you want fringe, take a look at newspaper editorial pages, read by a tiny minority. If you want enhance the marketplace of civic conversation, go where the people are and show some leadership.

Tenore links to a (pirated) column by the editor, James Gibbons, that has a puzzling line: "I find that most blogs lack the elegance, wit and insight one looks for in magazine commentary and editorial pages in their ideal state." Isn't it true that most of everything fails to measure up to the ideal? That's Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." I wonder if newspaper editorial pages can claim to beat that average.

Get this: 35 percent of all online teen girls blog, while only 20 percent of online teen boys do so, according to the latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life project. This comes as no surprise to me; I have two such female creatures in my household and it's something I can observe up close.

I've blocked Myspace.com at the cable router on a couple of occasions when I was concerned about homework focus. The Internet for them is much less about consuming content than it is about interpersonal communications.

Some of their usage might look to a publisher like "personal publishing," but to them it's much more about showing and telling friends, which I interpret as interpersonal communications. Our 15-year-old, Paige, is now up to 14,638 images in her photo gallery. What she is saying is, "Hey guys, here's what we did Saturday."

I've previously pointed out that the use of our successful participative newspaper-affiliated websites, such as BlufftonToday.com, is dominated by females. Gannett has taken the female group communications concept seriously and has launched "mom sites" in many of its newspaper markets.

If you have any lingering notions that the Internet is a place for geeks and guys, get over it.

Over the last five or six years we've seen a tremendous shift in power from destination sites to search. Google has been the big winner. In general, newspaper websites have been slow to recognize the implications of this shift, and have adjusted poorly to the new realities.

In the last 24 months a new contender has arisen: social networking sites, which are so "sticky" that they're displacing everybody else, even Google. And again, newspaper sites are slow to recognize the implications.

Myspace wasn't the first, but it was the first really big winner in that space, and became a platform for third parties to offer "widgets" that users can embed in their personal pages.

In the last six months Facebook has grown explosively. There are a host of reasons, but the big thing you should keep in mind is that it's a semi-open framework on which third parties can build mini-applications that interact with Facebook data. Facebook published a set of methods through which programmers can interact with Facebook data, going far beyond Myspace's ability to embed widgets. This set of methods is called an application programmer interface, or API.

This transforms Facebook from an application that people use into a what technologists call a platform. Marc Andreessen explains what that means:

Definitionally, a "platform" is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

In contrast, an "application" is a system that cannot be reprogrammed by outside developers. It is a closed environment that does whatever its original developers intended it to do, and nothing more.

There are more than 7,000 Facebook applications so far, including some from several newspapers. One of the most interesting, Neighborhoods, is being used by a company that runs a real estate listing website to slip their listings into Facebook space. Think about that for a minute.

This week Google fired back, unveiling OpenSocial, which aims to provide a standard API for developing applications that plug neatly into a host of existing and future social networks. On board are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

Given the magnitude of the change in Web consumption behavior brought about by social networking sites, newspaper companies need to think about how their content, tools and services might interoperate with these standards.

I'm not proposing that newspapers give up everything else and become providers of little applets to big social networking sites. On the contrary, there's bountiful opportunity for news sites, especially local newspapers, to build their own social networking environments, as we've demonstrated with BlufftonToday.com and other projects.

We live in an "and" universe, not an "or" universe, so don't be looking for one big winner to come out of this, or one single model, or one standard.

We'll be destinations and search engines and content syndicators and content integrators and social networks and satellites of social networks, all at the same time.

What is clear is this: We can't go on running islands.