The Care and Feeding of Your Network is a useful document at the ChangeThis website. You can read about the Five steps to greatness in Networking and more about networking.

Their definitions of the word network makes you think:

Network (n): a group of people that are all well-known by a person.

Network (v): helping people that you know get what they need and want so that they will feel compelled to reciprocate.

This was originally posted at another (now extinct) blog of mine.