Hello fellow IST and SRA junkies, I hope you’re all doing well on this wonderful April afternoon.

I know many of you have probably heard the term “social graph” tossed around. An Exeter-alum, Harvard drop-out popularized the term, although who’s to say who actually came up with it?

You might know him, his friends call him Zuck, a bit more than four years ago, he started a small social website called TheFacebook.com

Yes, that Mark Zuckerberg.

A fellow by the name of Brad Fitzpatrick defines Facebook’s usage of the term “social graph” as “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related.”

I have a much simpler definition — your social graph is friends and friends of friends (and onwards to six degrees of separation).

What you don’t realize, is although the first thing I mentioned is Facebook, businessmen and women, politicians, musicians — pretty much every field and walk of life — have known about this for years; and it has an even simpler definition.
Networking.

It’s a big word thrown around all the time, and I even have a friend, Matt Sabo, the PSU drum major, who started a networking club for the sole purpose of serious-minded PSU students to network with cool business people like Farnoosh Torabi, a PSU alumnus who works for Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com.

I’m sure by now you’ve had professors harp about the importance of joining clubs and societies and going to conferences, but I’d like to give an example of the vast IST-related network directly and in-directly related to Penn State.

A few months ago, I was treading down the first steps of a path that would later lead me to start a company. My dad, who works for the university, had a good friend Dr. Stan Supon, who works in the department of IST. Dr. Supon forwarded me to Dr. Santoro, who I had this semester for IST 110, who in turn gave me some good feedback on what I was working at the time (which is completely different than it is now), and he pointed me in the direction of a few different individuals and entities.

The first, was Lion Launch Pad, founded by Liz Kisenwhether, Dr. Robert Macy, and Rob Shedd, which remains, while half has split and become The Blue Line Network.

The second, was introducing me to the Weebly story, (which in doing research is how I met Daehee) which consists of three PSU students (two of which who are/were IST) — David Rusenko, Dan Veltri, and Chris Fanini — heading out West to form a web-page builder.

From The Blue Line Network, headed by Dave Barton, I’ve met a whole host of entrepreneurial-minded youngsters in the area, mostly all of which are doing a technology/web start-up, and I also connected with Todd Bacastow, another IST alum (whose dad happens to work for the university). Todd Jr. is now an associate with Pequot Ventures and very loyal to the PSU and State College community.

Even though I’m not in the entrepreneurship minor, with the help of Liz, I’ve attended a few meetings like the 3 Rivers Ventures Fair in Pittsburgh, where I meet awesome PSU engineers like Alejandro Barreto from Triple Overtime Promotions and Austin Fusiak.

Just this past weekend there was a decent-sized kick-off event for Michael Robinson’s company new partnership with the BlueLine, where there was a ton of football players and PSU athletics officers, Venture Capitalists, and of course, technologists, all schmoozing and … yes, you got it — networking!

And the second path?

After talking for a good bit to the Weebly guys, they connected me to yet another PSU technologist, albeit from the College of Engineering, Matt Brezina, who has been a bit successful with the start-up he’s co-founded, Xobni.

Matt was kind enough to introduce me to a couple leading technology blogging staffs — VentureBeat and Techcrunch — and now in my spare time I write a few articles for VentureBeat. (Hint: you should probably be following sites like Techmeme or Engadget to stay on top of the IT/IST world)

I could go on and on, but I’m not here to name-drop or to show my superior networking skills.

I have none — call it the will of God, serendipity, luck, chance, what have you, but it certainly wasn’t my doing that I got introduced to all these cool technology-minded Penn State people.

In fact, I don’t want it to have to be chance for any IST student out there, which is why I propose a quasi-unified PSU IST social graph.

Nothing formal, maybe even a BBQ before school lets out this semester to kick it off.

Information can be your best friend, or your worst enemy, and it’s no secret that the rising tide of the internet has distributed the flow of information a lot more evenly.

Why should networking (or the “social graph”) be any different. Often times, the small decisions in life that can boost your chances of success (whatever your definition) doesn’t come down to who you ALREADY know (i.e. your facebook friends) but rather who you SHOULD know.

People like Daehee Park, Hannah Hershey (who coincidentally I stumbled upon after reading a post by Daehee), Matt Brezina at Xobni, David Rusenko and the Weeblies, Dave Barton and The Blue Line Network, Chris Ganter and Go2Athlete, Todd Bacastow making waves in the VC-world, Rob Shedd co-founder of Lion Launch Pad and an IBM consultant, Mark Henderson at 8trk, Anshey Bhatia, Andrei Shindyapin with EzLearnz, Scott Woods of the State College Ruby meet-up group, Greg Pierce and Justin Goldman at LionMenus, or Scott Ayres from Drizzoo.

I don’t know everybody in that tiny paragraph above, and there are easily three to four hundred MORE, just in town, right here at University Park, that I SHOULD know.

If you haven’t noticed now, I like to think big, but even that may be a gross under statement. I strongly believe the PSU IST community could be on par with the likes of a Stanford, which churns our (both undergrad and grad) companies like Google, YouTube, and Yahoo, just to name a few. No offense, but why settle for a career as a consultant when you can start your own company, even if it has humble beginnings like Meezik?

A great friend of mine has started an organization, a church in fact, that has as one of it’s core values a very simple belief that really makes sense when you realize IST is all about connecting people and technology (this also sums up my idea of a unified Penn State IST social graph)…

“Nobody walks alone.”

You shouldn’t have to.

Tags: Blueline, drizzoo, Entrepreneurship, Facebook, lion launch pad, Mark Zuckberg, Pepperjam, Social Graph, startup, Weebly, xobni

Categories: Entrepreneurship, Opinion