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I’m here in Philadelphia, preparing for the Society for Scholarly Publishing‘s Top Management Roundtable. The topic is blogging and podcasting. We have incredibly talented speakers, bloggers, and podcasters coming to present, network, ‘cast, and publish at the meeting.

It made me think about how the fundamental question about all this isn’t, “How?”. We know how. We’ll show attendees how to use the technology, which is, like most disruptive technology, simpler, cheaper, and more reliable.

The question isn’t, “How?”. The main question is, “If?”.

If you start, if you try, if you begin, if you develop, if you commit — the question is, “If.”

It’s the same for joining online communities and social networks. The game-changer isn’t online or print or video or audio or blogs or anything else. It’s joining.

Deciding to join or not defines how we think about time, spend our time, and expand our time. Online, joining means more today than ever before. It has amplification effects.

This notion first began to reawaken in me when I heard people talk about blogging as a proxy for lassitude and depravity. As a blogger, I began to hear the snide remarks about how I must live in the basement and play with dolls.

One of the casual cranks people make about bloggers is that they “have too much time on their hands.”

Writing a blog does take time. Social networking does take time. Yet, it seems people, and a large number of them, are willing to shift their priorities to have this time. A friend of mine who knows such things recently told me that the internal growth rate of social network adoption overall exceeds that for any given social network application, suggesting that people have time to adopt multiple social networking applications.

All of this seems to have cut the legendary six degrees of separation down to three.

Joining does change the game. It changes things on a large scale. It changes things for people who join.

People who haven’t joined, and those who are also negative, have a lot of time on their hands as well. If I could repurpose into social networking, blogging, and podcasting the number of hours repeatedly spent by these people marveling at all the time social networkers have to blog, Twitter, and Facebook, I think a huge and vibrant social network would emerge, filled with thoughts, connections, and linkages.

Joining is a binary game-changer. You either bring the tools and techniques of modern communication into your life, or you don’t. That is, you’re either in or you’re out.

Look for updates from Philadephia at the Top Management Roundtable blog, including audio and blog entries. Join us.