I've been slowly making my way through Chris Brogan and Julien Smith's superb Trust Agents over this weekend. From what I can make of the book so far, the key to increasing the amount of trust people place in you online revolves around how much stuff you put out there. By being a prolific content provider and by demonstrating how competently you speak about a particular topic online goes a long way to building a loyal online and offline following.

This is particularly true in Brogan's case.

On most days, I'll receive an email blast from his mailing list containing at least three separate entries which he writes himself, each of them chock-full of juicy tidbits that I note down and usually put into play on the spot. The kinds of things which can help you to improve your daily productivity, the kinds of subjects which you can then discuss with your friends and colleagues or use as conversation starters at a party, or even as fodder for your own weekend posts (wink, wink).

Given how prolific Brogan appear to be -- it's no secret he's one of the fifteen most read blogs in the world, according to Google's analtyics engine -- and I usually sit up and listen when he expresses his opinion about something of relevance to the online (and offline) communities.

Which is why something's been lingering with me all weekend long. It's a topic Brogan contemplates often, the concept of "but isn't this whole online thing making everyone more antisocial?" Brogan and Smith devote an entire sidebar to refuting this idea in Trust Agents, so I'd like to riff off with a few remarks of my own since my own online activities and work place me squarely within this surprisingly not-so-uncommon territory.

The authors' answer to that question is a resounding "no," and I tend to agree with them.

"No" because spending time online is no longer the exclusive purview of the geeks and the nerds as portrayed within most eighties films now that people can spend upwards of ten hours per day in front of their Mac or PC screens. Rather than causing netizens to become more antisocial -- what with he countless hours consumed puttering around on Facebook, Twitter, and/or chat applications like GTalk -- the connections established during online time are leading to an unprecendented raft of healthy, successful interactions in between all of these professional tech and social media events than ever before. Being online is the key, say Brogan and Smith, to improving your offline professional and social lives, and I'm a living example of it.

Here's how: during our most recent trip to Beijing and Shanghai, our entire social calendar was planned in advance over the net. Prior to our departure for Asia, I was able to make heads or tails of the influence peddling hierarchies within the twin expatriate scene of those two mega-cities, connections which then lead to some dinners, several helpful coffee meetings-cum-advisory sessions, and even a spirited Tweetup -- my first ever -- in the Chinese capital. It was there where I managed to forge five new contacts, people I'll be definitely be seeing again during my next swing-through the country. Moreover, these are the sorts of folks who I am in daily contact with from wherever I am in the world today, as we help each other complete our respective small, incrementally important, little tasks. They also happen to be some of the more interesting people I've ever met, and given how long I've known them, this is even more remarkable.

For example, we met a guy in Beijing who had an otaku for Chinese public transportation. Agreeing to meet at our hotel prior that Tweetup, the first thing he did -- before even sinking into the obsequious banter -- was to hand us two "Beijing transportation cards" plus a fistful of receipts which we could use to take Beijing's subway or other mass transit networks. Later, how showed us how his computer was stuffed to the gills with relevant subway timetable spreadsheets, cutoff times between the various stations on Beijing's sprawling undergound lines, sharing with us his secret why he knew how long -- down to the minute -- he would arrive in our lobby to fetch us, even allowing for a couple of minutes in the walk between the station and our hotel (ask Andreea, I even felt terrible that we showed up three minutes late for our rendez-vous there, and all it took us was an elevator ride down eight floors).

Speaking of China again, did you perhaps know that most of the dating activity occurs through online ads and chat? To Western ears, this might sound repugnant, but I'd seen and read about this happening often enough that it doesn't seem quite so foolish anymore. Bonds are made and broken in an almost routine fashion in that massive country over the internet, and ever since the Internet has become the mainstream means of communicating and entertaining oneself in that gigantic country, online is fast becoming the sole way of making social connections. It holds true for other nations where direct approaches in public aren't societally-acceptable.

So is online a waste of time? As you can see from the above examples, hardly.

On the contrary, I don't think I could live as well in the absence of the amount of time I devote to Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Somehow, life wouldn't be nearly as rich or fulfilling as it is with it.

A huge thanks to Brogan and Smith for reminding me of this over the weekend.