Recently, NTEN Member Paul Lamb presented to the NTEN Discuss Affinity Group his LinkedIn fundraising experiment: using the social network as a tool to create dollars for Street Tech students through the LinkedIn Answers feature.

A few Affinity Group members felt this was on the borderline of the LinkedIn user agreement and social network etiquette.

Only 10 years ago, social networks were built quite differently. We might pump a few hands at conferences, place a few phone calls or meet people for lunch. A labor-intensive way of expanding the little black book, to be sure, but that's the way everybody did it. Networks lived in brainspace and on slips of paper.

But a decade is a long time. Person-to-person meetings are still a great way to make connections, but networks have increasingly less to do with seeing people and more to do with outlets such as LinkedIn.