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You may have received an email on my behalf which begins, "You've been sponsored as 'Friend' by Greg Roggeman as part of something called sixdegrees." If not, you probably will within the next week or so; I'm starting slowly.

Carl Steadman sponsored me, and now I'm busy recruiting everyone I can. It sounds like some kind of chain-letter or pyramid scheme or something, but there doesn't seem to be anything to lose except for some time. If nothing else, it seems to be a pretty interesting experiment. Some of the site is not accessible via LYNX, but I do have access to the majority of the system, anyway -- good enough for now.

I've never been very good at networking. I don't mean computer networks here, either. I'm talking about the kind of networking whereby you make personal contacts through people you already know -- you know the old saying: "It's not what you know but who you know." Now, though, good old fashioned networking has become easier due to newfangled computer networking.

Claiming to be one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Web, the introductory email goes on to explain the six degrees of separation concept, whereby everyone on the planet is connected to each other through fewer than six people. I was intrigued, so I spent a couple hours checking into it and decided to participate.

You can confirm your relationship to me by replying to that introductory email, but I recommend going through the website -- it seems to me to be easier that way. To join you must start out by supplying two contacts of your own, so you may want to have the names and email addresses of a couple of friends or family members in mind before you get started.

In a past column, I wrote of my contact with Walter Miller. I ended that piece by mentioning Carl Steadman. To have him add me to his list of friends is really cool, and that's the main reason I decided to check into this "relational database" concept. There have been many different attempts at establishing "communities" on the web and most fall short because the membership has been splintered between the different communities. I don't know, and, quite frankly, I have my doubts about this one too, but I'll give it a try and see what happens with it. I hope you'll check it out with me -- who knows, it could lead to some beneficial contacts.

Only time will tell whether this experiment will pan out or not and I haven't had the time to read through all of the information yet, but I do know that many of the big players on the web are there -- and through Carl many of them are now my second degree associations, although I actually found Carl through Walter. If you haven't received an invitation from me to join my circle of friends and you're interested, just let me know and I'd be more than happy to add you to my list of contacts.

And now that I'm done with this edition of my "Thoughts," I'm going back to see if anyone besides my friend Timothy has confirmed their relationship to me.