I live in Delaware.
I am thinking about writing a book about making money on the internet. A chapter in my book will be about using a website such as Ning to create a social network. The question is do I need the developers permission to mention their name, and explain how to use their product?
Generally, you can use the name in a "purely descriptive" manner -- that is, you can use a trademark to describe the underlying trademarked object. It's perfectly legal to use the term "Amazon.com" to refer to Amazon.com, for example.
Explaining how to use the product is legal under copyright and trademark law, with a few caveats. If you use screenshots, there may be some limitations under copyright law as to how you use those shots -- but this is a very fact-dependent analysis, so it's not really possible to provide a general rule. Also, there may be contractual issues -- if the website in question has a terms of use or similar license agreement that you must abide by to use the site (or agree to by using the site, whether or not you read it), you may be contractually prohibited from doing certain things, so you will want to check that avenue carefully.
