I admit it - as journalists go I’m pretty old-school. A telephone and a typewriter are good enough for me (OK, maybe you can throw in Google as well.) Reid Hoffman, boss of LinkedIn, is always telling me what a great tool his social networking site is for making contacts and digging out information but, well, somehow I could never quite bring myself to network that way. Let’s face it: you wouldn’t have found Deep Throat plastering comments over Woodward and Bernstein’s Facebook wall.

This is a cautionary tale about what happens when old-school journalism meets Web 2.0. (Confession: it hurts to be as transparent as this, but sometimes you just have to let the readers in on a few trade secrets.)

It started over a swanky dinner in the opulent Silicon Valley surroundings of the Kohl Mansion. Munjal Shah, CEO of visual search engine Like.com (worth checking out, an interesting idea), let on that it was now cheaper to hire in the Valley than Bangalore. He had sacked his Indian engineers and moved jobs to the US. He blogged about it here. Interesting.

A couple of days later I bumped into Reid at a swanky party at the opulent Silicon Valley home of venture capitalist Heidi Roizen (honestly, it’s not always like this.) Reid has money in a few Valley start-ups, had he heard of anyone else shifting jobs from high-cost India to the gritty third-world suburbs of Palo Alto or Mountain View?

Unbeknown to this reporter, Reid took it on himself to demonstrate the power of LinkedIn by posing this question on the network. He got quite a discussion started (free sign-up required). Futher surprise when Mujal popped up to join the chat - we had exchanged messages after the dinner but failed to talk, and he was now on vacation and proving hard to pin down.

Eventually Munjal emailed back. It turns out that a couple of other journalists had seen the LinkedIn discussion and contacted him. They hadn’t written about Like.com’s reverse-offshoring yet, he said, but he was sure they would. That was enough for me: time to get this story into print fast before the competition have their way with it (the final story, from Monday’s FT, is here. The Wall Street Journal’s take, appearing a day later, is here.)

This saga has a serious point. Journalists are not the only people who guard their network of contacts and their ideas jealously. These are valuable assets. Online social networking seems to be turning into the latest business fad, but there are drawbacks to carrying on your business in plain view.

July 3rd, 2007 in Internet | Permalink