I think it is safe to say that sharing information is at the center of social networking. And blogging software is the best and most popular tool available which combines social networking and sharing information publicly.

Blogging is at the center of many social networks.  Livejournal and xanga are blogging tools with social networking built in. Similarly, ecademy and multiply are social networking sites with blogging tools built in.

Kinja even recently tried to make reading what other people read, a social networking activity. (e.g. example digest). Bloglines might succeed at doing just that.

It is only natural that timely sharing of information with different degrees of a social network be a core piece of social networks. Although blogger recently launched profiles and public profiles have been available in typepad (e.g. mine) for awhile now, most bloggers rely on blogrolls to denote social networks.  Many bloggers use blogrolling.com and TypePad users often use typelists. The recently improved Bloglines.com, the online rss aggregator, also powers blogrolls. If these public profiles aren't enough, some bloggers have started publishing republishable "blogger bios" as weblog posts to aid their networking using blogs.

In addition to explicit definitions of social networks by bloggers using blogrolls, blogging tools such as typepad, blogspot and self-hosted solutions enable bloggers to form many informal dynamic social networks. Through examination of these implicit social networks through the use of tools like technorati's who's linking to this, waypath's related stuff post analysis, blogsnow's popular links,  pubsub's - who's talking about this - email alerts and rss feeds,  and feedster's keyword searching, many connections between bloggers reveal themselves.  

Having conversations in real time by sharing information is fueling the birth of all kinds of knowledge in the blogging world.  These "blogging search and discovery" tools help us navigate the distributed conversations going on across weblogs, so we can pick and choose the nuggets of info we want from the massive amounts out there.  

Plus, these tools help us to meet and form relationships with kindred blogging spirits…

Robert Paterson notes that, as a result of blogging, he is actually settling down with a social network of like minded  bloggers and starting to do more than just blog back and forth.  They are starting to form working relationships.

I have been blogging for more than 2 years now and a pattern is becoming clear. My B[l]og world is settling down into a discrete world that feels more and more like a tribe with all the magic numbers involved that Dunbar and Ross Mayfield have spoken about.

I've started to do similar things. Maybe a bit different than Robert since I don't have a defined blogging clique. (I am not the kind of guy to run with one crowd.) However, I am starting to talk about my projects and other entrepreneur's projects and possible collaboration between us, with the people I meet while blogging.

So, without further ado, by the power vested in me, by Judith Meskill, I pronounce blogging as the ultimate social networking tool.  Go forth and spread this decree.

How do you use your blog to network?