A quick thought on the differences between a service and a network and getting real value from joining up online and offline services.

Service

We get people registering their interest in our Experts Online service, and it is now possible to even register online. Once registered, the end user can ask questions, search and browse answers. But although the knowledge is shared between all the users of the service, there is no real interaction between users (peer to peer) although is it perfectly possible for any users to comment on existing questions. In fact questions are deliberately anonymised where necessary, to prevent sensitive information being made public. However this does put a barrier to networking.