Peter Merholz has an interview with Valdis Krebs, whose work on social network analysis and knowledge managementI recently discovered. Anything which "...allows us to look at and map what are normally invisible dynamics inside a community" is a good thing, although it's painfully clear that these are babysteps.

Weblogs and social network analysis tools are highly complementary, and I think they're at similar stages of development. It's beginning to be possible to follow "who-reads-whom" and "who-comments-on-what" links, and use these to map the network of connections. But simply mapping the connectivity tells us little about the meaning of the connection (in the weblog world, a link is a link, and it's generally a positive comment), and even less about its effectiveness.

I'm not sure effectiveness is the right word, there. Something like "empowerability" is what I'm looking for. If you need to take action, what support do you need in doing that, and how do you marshal your resources to make it happen? Can social-network analysis tools help with that?
This is partly about knowledge management -- do I have the right context? what do I need in order to make a decision? -- but it's also a very political question: do I have buyin? what do I need in order to have this actually happen, if I can't do it by myself?

Take the Palladium story:

These weren't trivial guys... [one] quickly brought in a couple of very senior research architect level guys and a key guy from the [OS] team. They worked on this in their spare time... they really pushed this thing. And other forces in the universe have come around to where this has clearly emerged as an idea whose time has come. Because these guys are really good, and they know how to make things happen at Microsoft, they finally succeeded in having this established as a product unit.