Impact of a World of Loosely Connected Individual Relationships?

After posting yesterday eLearning Technology: Web 2.0 Tools, Networks and Community (Individuals vs. Collective) - where I discussed how my use of Web 2.0 tools were forming a network of individual relationships, today I ran across a post by Dave Pollard - Social Networking in Business: An Update where he lists out a series of tools that create links between people much as I was discussing. As I stated yesterday, what's interesting about these links is that there is no community associated with them as there generally has been in the past for me. Thus, I'm finding myself in a world of:

Loosely Connected Individual Relationships

This raises all sorts of questions for me:

• Should I do something more with these relationships or is the loose connection enough?
  
  For example, I've met 20+ other bloggers through writing on common topics. A few I've individually communicated with outside of the blogosphere. A couple I've asked to be on panels or met at conferences. Maybe this is enough, but I feel that if I was looking to find out which other bloggers (or other people who I am loosely connected with) will be going to a conference I'm going to be attending, I have no easy way to reach out. As I said yesterday, I don't have a list. I also believe that relationships are built by a series of interactions. Should I be looking to engage with other people in some way beyond the blog? If so, what, how, why? Or maybe a loose connection is fine? Maybe that's the new world? Maybe I need to get used to it?
  
• Do "communities" exist within these loosely connected individuals or do you need something more to form a community?
  
• What should communities such as TrDev (a discussion group) or the eLearningGuild or ASTD do with/about these loose connections that span in, across, through their communities?

If you have thoughts on this, I would love to hear from you either through comments or through a blog posting.