I don't spend much time reading good old paper off-line and since I was reading a book at the time I missed until today this article on an almost one month old issue of The Economist.

For the past decade or so, sociologists have been pushing one more concept, "social capital" - trust or community, in one of its guises - that is now also being taken up by economists. Crudely speaking, the more people trust each other, the better off their society. They might work more efficiently together, for example. In business, trust might obviate the need for complicated contracts, and thus save on lawyers' fees.

Besides using "social capital" to measure countries' economic power, I belive that the same concept can be applied to any community. Applied to the weblogs community, this concept help explaining the huge power that has been unleashed by blogging.

Reading other people's weblogs creates trust and efficiency, and it's an excellent base to build businesses and relationships.

This is interesting also for k-logging (or Business Journalling): if a country with a better community is richer, then also a company with a better developed trust and efficiency amoung its workers is going to be better off than others.

So, no, we are not wasting time writing on our weblogs, we're investing.