If you make it a community they will come

I went to the reception for The Symposium on Social Architecture at the Harvard Faculty club last night. The people I met were mostly planning on selling pickaxes and shovels in the Blog gold-rush. The assumption is that companies are going to have to build "community-based" systems around their products, and these people are building the tools to do this. I agree with the basic premise, but the dot-com bust showed that not everyone was able to make money selling infrastructure. There is usually a slower adoption rate by businesses than the bleeding edge predicts. I'll report back tonight on the actual conference sessions.