Of course, the answers weren't always forthright, and that spurned even more social networking.

Gadbois used her community blog focused on her NorthWest Carrolton neighborhood to highlight a plan to put in a Walgreen's pharmacy where a supermarket had been before the flooding. The neighborhood wanted the supermarket back but developers told Gadbois during contentious meetings that the deal was done and everyone had sold out their property.

Shortly thereafter, Gadbois stopped at a garage sale of her neighbor Miss Verthalot and bought an ugly dress. She asked the woman, who lived within the boundaries of the Walgreen's project, if she had sold out. Miss Verthalot said she had not. Gadbois posted a short story of her purchase and a picture under the heading "Miss Verthalot's Dress" on her blog where Walgreen's attorneys had been snooping and where they soon discovered that Gadbois had inside information proving that the developers were lying. The tone of subsequent meetings with the Walgreen's developers changed and the project was not done.

"The government reads our blogs now," Gutierrez says. "[Citizens] created a voice."

He says the social consciousness was sparked to action by a wave of murders at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007 that led New Orleans citizens to march to City Hall and demand a safer city.

That consciousness helped ignite the social networking wave, which swept up McBride, Gadbois and Gutierrez, after the introduction of the "map that launched a thousand ships."

The map showed neighborhoods that had been under water and would need to prove their viability before the city would work with the federal government to bring rebuilding aid.

It started with a neighborhood called Broadmoor; its recruitment drive; and its use of mailing lists, bulletin boards and online marketing to solicit the help of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and corporations like Motorola to draft a rebuilding plan.

The Mid-City neighborhood used the New Orleans wiki to draw up a rebuilding plan outline, which was collaboratively written and edited by residents. They used Yahoo Groups as an information repository.

The Beacon of Hope project used the Web to create a community that has logged 33,000 volunteer hours and has 100 volunteers working every day.

The group is now headed to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to help create a Beacon of Hope in neighborhoods there ravaged by flooding.

"Hopefully we will find a new core competency in New Orleans in terms of civic participation," says Gutierrez.

But he also says corporations should find a knowledge that social networking can bring about dramatic change if given a chance to grow.