I was fascinated this morning to read a news item on Yahoo! regarding how a 13-year-old in the United States came across a 2.93-carat diamond lying in the rough. I can draw a comparison to social networks.

One of the facts that I learned from the news story was that anyone can walk into the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas and look around for diamonds. More than 25,000 diamonds have been found there in the years since the site was designated a state park in 1972, with about 600 diamonds being found each year, on average. These are “real” diamonds, varying in size and quality, with some being quite valuable.

My perception of diamond mining was more along the lines of the movie, Blood Diamond, so I was thrilled to learn that I could join a diamond hunt without worrying about being shot. That might make the process too tame for some of you, which is fine–more diamonds for me.

I feel the same way about those of you who have not joined one, or both, of two free new social networking sites for communicators: Melcrum Publishing’s The Communicators’ Network and Ragan Communications’ MyRagan. Fine–more “diamonds in the rough” for me and the others who have decided to join.

I understand a reluctance to give up more precious time to explore and participate in these sites. I’ve already found, however, that the time that I’ve spent hunting through each site has produced some valuable nuggets of information.

Now today, as Melcrum’s TCN has surpassed the 1,000-member mark, the publishing company’s managing director, Robin Crumby, made the following announcement on the site:

We have just changed the ‘News’ section on your ‘MyHome’ page to include news and free resources from Melcrum. This will include free articles from Strategic Communication Management and The Hub for Internal Communicators, together with news items, blogs posts and executive summaries of Melcrum reports to download for free.

It’s a great bonus to TCN members, and I applaud Melcrum for doing it. Tired of hunting around for ideas and ways to improve communications within your organization? The answer might be laying in open sight on one of these two free open sites.