Anyone who wants to rank socially networked cities is going to be in for a fight. But the brave souls at Men’sHealth aren’t shying away from a tussle, placing the top 100 most socially networked cities in order for all to see.

How did they do it? It appears to be a fair and scientifically valid procedure. First, Men’sHealth figured out each city’s LinkedIn and Facebook users per capita, and then tapped the NetProspex marketing database to figure out each location’s amount of overall Twitter usage.

Not stopping there, the next step was to consult online ad network Chitika to quantify traffic from MySpace, Friendster, Reddit and Digg, and finally, SimplyMap helped determine the percentage of households using chat rooms and blogs.

The list below is as much a study of how to find this information as it is a valid assessment of which city has the bragging rights to calling itself The Capital of Social Networking. Speaking of capital, who knew our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., would be at the top of the list, or that Milwaukee (#45), the location of Mashable’s humble Midwest Test Facility, would rate higher than the mighty New York City (#53), home of Mashable HQ?

See how your city ranks, and feel free to trash-talk those other lesser bergs in the comments.

Most socially networked
1 Washington, DC A+
2 Atlanta, GA A+
3 Denver, CO A+
4 Minneapolis, MN A+
5 Seattle, WA A+
6 San Francisco, CA A
7 Orlando, FL A
8 Austin, TX A
9 Boston, MA A
10 Salt Lake City, UT A-

11 Cincinnati, OH A-
12 Raleigh, NC A-
13 Burlington, VT A-
14 Portland, OR B+
15 Madison, WI B+
16 Dallas, TX B+
17 Portland, ME B
18 Sacramento, CA B
19 Aurora, CO B
20 Boise, ID B
21 Charlotte, NC B
22 Wilmington, DE B
23 Oakland, CA B
24 St. Louis, MO B
25 Las Vegas, NV B
26 Columbus, OH B
27 San Diego, CA B
28 San Jose, CA B
29 St. Paul, MN B-
30 Plano, TX B-
31 Tampa, FL B-
32 Nashville, TN B-
33 Los Angeles, CA B-
34 Phoenix, AZ B-
35 Newark, NJ B-
36 Miami, FL B-
37 Norfolk, VA C+
38 Richmond, VA C+
39 Chicago, IL C+
40 Durham, NC C+
41 Colorado Springs, CO C+
42 Des Moines, IA C+
43 Jersey City, NJ C+
44 Indianapolis, IN C+
45 Milwaukee, WI C+
46 Fargo, ND C+
47 Columbia, SC C+
48 Houston, TX C+
49 Philadelphia, PA C+
50 Birmingham, AL C+
51 Cleveland, OH C+
52 Kansas City, MO C
53 New York, NY C
54 Greensboro, NC C
55 Reno, NV C
56 Manchester, NH C
57 Providence, RI C
58 Baltimore, MD C
59 Little Rock, AR C
60 Louisville, KY C
61 Sioux Falls, SD C-
62 Omaha, NE C-
63 Pittsburgh, PA C-
64 Baton Rouge, LA C-
65 Lexington, KY C
66 Wichita, KS C-
67 Anchorage, AK C-
68 Lincoln, NE C-
69 Cheyenne, WY D+
70 New Orleans, LA D+
71 Tucson, AZ D+
72 Buffalo, NY D+
73 Honolulu, HI D+
74 Santa Ana, CA D+
75 Charleston, WV D+
76 Oklahoma City, OK D+
77 Virginia Beach, VA D+
78 Winston-Salem, NC D+
79 Tulsa, OK D+
80 Albuquerque, NM D
81 Fort Worth, TX D
82 San Antonio, TX D
83 Jackson, MS D
84 Chesapeake, VA D
85 Jacksonville, FL D
86 Riverside, CA D
87 Memphis, TN D-
88 St. Petersburg, FL D-
89 Toledo, OH D-
90 Corpus Christi, TX D-

Least socially networked
91 Billings, MT D-
92 Fort Wayne, IN D-
93 Bridgeport, CT D-
94 Detroit, MI D-
95 Fresno, CA F
96 Bakersfield, CA F
97 Lubbock, TX F
98 Stockton, CA F
99 Laredo, TX F
100 El Paso, TX F

Values still are falling in most of the region, and that trend is expected to continue into next year. It could be a decade or more before underwater borrowers regain their lost equity. In the meantime, their options are limited and all come with major drawbacks.

“A lot of people were swept up in the euphoria going on at the time and felt if they didn’t buy a house then, they’d be priced out of the market forever,” said Mike Larson, a housing analyst in Jupiter. “They probably jumped off the fence before they were ready to be homeowners, and now they feel trapped.”

Lisa and Victor Perez paid $243,000 for a two-bedroom villa west of Boynton Beach in April 2006. They considered themselves lucky to get a home at a price that seemed reasonable at the time.

The couple say they’re current on their payments but discouraged because the mortgage is severely underwater. Homes in their community are selling for about $100,000 now. Their unit is assessed by Palm Beach County at $96,840.

The Perezes, both 46, would like to pursue job opportunities in Georgia or another state, but they can’t seriously consider moving anytime soon.

“We don’t know what to do,” said Lisa, who has a background in direct marketing, though she isn’t working now. “All I want is for my house to be put back to market value.”

Many underwater borrowers would have to bring $100,000 or more to the closing table if they tried to sell now. They likely can’t qualify for a refinancing or a loan modification because they’re not behind on the mortgage payments, their homes have lost too much value, or both.

In China, five of the world’s ten largest buildings are now under construction. Look out below!, says Vikram Mansharamani, a financial services veteran and part-time academic who has developed a multidisciplinary framework for sniffing out bubbles.v

Mansharamani is author of a new book, BoomBustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before they Burst. The book is based in part on a course that Mansharamani, who has two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has taught at Yale, his alma mater. While many analysts focus on a single causal factor (Fannie Mae caused the housing bubble! Snake-oil salesmen from Silicon Valley fomented the dotcom bubble!) Mansharamani takes a multidisciplinary approach. Borrowing from analysts in fields such as economics, psychology, and biology (bulls and bears, it turns out, act a lot like swarming ants), Mansharamani has developed a series of lenses through which to examine market behavior. Systematically examining outbursts of mania, from Dutch investors’ infatuation with Tulips in the 1630s to Florida real estate in the 1920, can help sniff out bubbles.

If you look through Mansharamani’s lenses, it’s clear to see there’s a bubble going on in China. Tall buildings aren’t just symbolic of reckless ambition. “Skyscrapers are manifestation of easy money, overconfidence, and hubris,” he says. And they are excellent indicators of a top. “In New York in 1929 there were three buildings competing to be the world’s tallest skyscraper,” he notes. In 1997, the massive Petronas Towers in Malaysia were completed just in time for the Asian financial crisis. The Burj Dubai rose in 2007 to snatch the title of world’s tallest building – just in time for the financial crisis to his the Persian Gulf.

Beyond skyscrapers, Mansharamani notes, “China today exhibits many of the signs that have characterized many of the speculative manias throughout history.” Those include: easy money, overconfidence, and high amounts of leverage. The rise of moral hazard is another indicator. “In China, you have state-owned banks lending to state-owned enterprises to buy land from the state,” he notes. (What could go wrong?) In addition, it’s always a danger sign when economic systems begin to regard what should be outputs as inputs.

Throughout China, provincial officials are obsessed with hitting targets for GDP. Focusing on what should be an end result as an initial goal “leads people to do things that may not make economic sense.” Mansharamani cites as an example a regional leader in China who, desperate to meet a GDP target, blew up a recently constructed bridge. “He got credit for the explosives he bought, and then for the steel and cement he bought and the constructions workers he hired.”

The question for investors during bubbles is how to know when to get out. And that’s one area Mansharamani hasn’t tackled. “I do think timing is a very difficult problem in terms of identifying popping of it,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s worth shorting China at this point in time, but it is definitely prudent to avoid it.” What’s more, he notes, countries and industries throughout the world that depend in large measure on China’s rampant growth are also potentially in danger.

Using Mansharamani’s lenses, one would conclude that the current gold market exhibits plenty of bubblicious signs. He agrees, to a point. A key development in any investment mania is when it crosses over from the province of professionals to a mass phenomenon. That’s happened with gold. “Walking around the city, you see a lot of people advertising that they want to buy gold,” Mansharamani said. “Everyone is talking about gold, and that is a late stage sign.”

Another worrisome sign is the way that an investment boom tends to feed on itself through leverage and financial innovation. Example: housing prices rise because banks lend against housing collateral, and the rising value of the collateral spurs people to borrow more against their homes. A similar dynamic is happening in gold. “The gold market has had tremendous innovation, in the form of exchange traded funds (ETFS), leveraged ETFS, and everything in between,” Mansharamani notes. This innovation has, in turn, affected the price of gold. The advent of gold ETFs, he notes, “has increased the demand for physical gold.”

But there’s one important caveat. Before talking about gold, we should note that “it is an unusual asset at so many levels.” As a sort of “anti-money,” Mansharamani argues, “it is a proxy for lack of trust in responsible monetary policy.” And in recent years, there’s been something of a bubble in that as well.

Interested in entering a drawing for a free copy of Vikram Mansharamani’s book? Send an e-mail to: talkyourbook@yahoo.com

Daniel Gross is economics editor at Yahoo! Finance

Subscribe to Daniel Gross’s RSS feed here .

Follow him on Twitter: @grossdm . Email him at grossdaniel11@yahoo

You can find his columns here