Ross Mayfield's Weblog http://ross.typepad. com

Ross Mayfield has been blogging since 2002 and was one of the earliest Silicon Valley executives to have spotted the potential of social media on the web.

Back in December 2002, he co-founded Socialtext, a company that provides collaborative wiki software to large business customers (5,000 Dell support staff use the company's software to manage a collaborative knowledge base).

With a career that began in the not for profit sector and several Silicon Valley start-ups, Mayfield is not short of life experience.

This diversity is reflected in his blog, which covers everything from e-commerce trends to micro-finance, company acquisitions to enterprise social software.

He is clearly a blogger who values quality over quantity, with posts generally long enough to join the dots but not so long you confine them to the "read later" pile. A recent meeting with the Estonian prime minister (in town to open a "tech embassy" in the valley) led him to muse on the possibilities of Estonia becoming a test bed for electronic identity services (over 80 per cent of the population have an OpenID based smartcard).

A regular speaker and attendee at tech events in the valley and further afield, his reports on these are a good way of keeping abreast of current trends.

With headlines like "Enterprise Social Software doesn't get you laid, it gets you promoted", Mayfield doesn't take himself too seriously. On days he doesn't post there are still nuggets of value to be had from the widgets that adorn the sidebars of the site which show his posts to Twitter and his latest Flickr photos.

His sidebar list of 150 blogs which he rates should provide some fresh reading for the most jaded of feed readers.

Mayfield was also one of the many established Silicon Valley executives who gave of their time generously last week to share their experience of building a start-up with the visiting Paddy's Valley delegation. Moreover, his blog still dispenses plenty of gems of wisdom.