Last Post..For Now

I noticed I received the most hits on my blog in the class coincidence? I think not. I think it was because I put some stupid videos on my blog that gave it an edge.

I think if I wrote about issues that I directly effect me I would perhaps continue to write this and maybe I will continue this blog later on. I think it might be too hard to get people to read my blog because I don't have too much to write about. You never know though.

I hope everyone enjoys the next couple weeks and for those graduation like me congratulations and to those who have to take all those finals good luck.

My last video will be my favorite video that isn't vulgar.

Coming to an End

Social Networking and the Internet are in full steam but is there an end?


We have gotten to a point where Regular Joe can take his 15 minutes a fame to a profession.

Some trailer trash can get a ball in the rocks and it can be shown over the world in matter of seconds.

We can stay connected through various social internet networks and see the mistakes our friends make on weekends without the strenuous task of actually staying "connected."

But are we getting bored of this and how long will it last?

The Many Challenges of Social Networking
This site brings up some valid points about the fast growing social trends and if they have matured.

Companies are finding out no one really clicks the ads on these sites and are starting to take away the advertisement so Average Joe may not really be able to make this a profession. Theres also now a million Average Joes trying to do the same thing.

People are loving to stay connected but not loving those popups. If Facebook gets taken over by the Evil Empires (Which it has) advertisment can take away the trust of those logged in and leave if they can actually make it through the Mission Impossible task of deleting your account. That stalker who lives off of seeing your pictures might be pretty upset if you finally do get out.

Where do I see this all going?

There is just going to be changes but I don't think this trend of social connecting will die down. If the video is popular it will find its way into others, if it is a good blog people will find it. It's the internet, information has no where to hide.

Rules of Competition if facebook loses its luster some shiny new program will surely take its place.

Social Networking will stay on the Internet but will find new and creative tools to stay there.
We are at the tip of the Iceburg

Cellife-instead of phone!

Good title I know the semester is ending and each coming weak my brain loses more interest in anything other then getting out of school.

Cellphones are starting to make us all look like zombies. I admit I am one of them. I have a blackberry which gives me at least 2 extra cool points right? no 2 less i hate myself. But I can actually live off of this phone. I can communicate and interact with a wealth of knowledge through this tiny device it is almost as good as a computer. I even have the option of GPS where I can find places and people through my phone. I don't know how much it is and I am already paying enough.

This idea of finding people through there phone is pretty scary now that it can be easily distributed into the hands of regular civilians like ourselves.

Check this website
It talks about how the phone can find you and direct you to the closest interest you are looking for, that is scary we are going to look back in 10 years and say remember when the phone was just a high powered internet machine.

remember when you wanted to do this to your cellphone? won't do that to these few hundred dollar phones.

Presidential Web Race

Coming up next semester there will be a new President in office. I don't understand how everyone is happy for this there has to be a majority of people who voted for W or he wouldn't have been elected right? I guess I'm no political science major so I just wouldn't understand.
Well either way more then half this campus has been ready for the Election of 2008 and have been seen drolling and screaming like school girls (even the guys.) Other then the whole Gender and Race being a major factor in this election another huge addition in the use of social networking.
a few websites talk about this like Barack's Secret Weapon I'll ruin it for you it's the internet.
People are using the social networking websites to get connected with one another and stage meetings and support groups for there presidential hopefuls.

This can be good and bad. I feel a lot of these websites and meetings are taking away from the actual important part of the election and thats the politics. These websites and groups are telling you to vote for change or some other catchy phrase and not really what to vote for. I am registered Republican but consider myself Libertarian because I feel Democrats are Sissys and Republicans are nuts. (I'm more nuts then sissy) I saw there was a meeting for Democratic Caucus that was giving out free Chipotle, I don't turn down free food. Long story short the sides weren't arguing about which side was going to lower the taxes or why they would better the country they were just blabbing about why the other side sucked. This isn't helping America.

Videos like this don't go too much into why Barack is better.

Who to Hire

Thought this was a good topic to hit on with me being at the end of the road in my college career. I think I've written about this a couple of times but there was an interesting site that talks about the best people to hire and it wasn't one of those run in the mills sites that says just look for great resumes. It also has a top Ten List, I love that. Heres the Site

It talks about how the trends of hiring should go off the carbon copy perfect resume. It goes into the quality of the person. If I started up a company I wouldn't look so much at the person's resume as much as the kind of image you get and how you feel they will fit in a team. I think this is such an important task that they shouldn't leave it to people low on the team to do the interviewing. I think the interviews shouldn't be just one day sitting at a desk either the person should be brought into the workday and have everyone feel them out kind've like what we do with recruits for track.

A good idea I read about was to use the blog as a resume.
Here you find out who you really are dealing with and there interest and you can tell by what they talk about and how they interpret ideas how intelligent and interesting they are. With some of the videos I have on my blog I hope they don't use this one.

Specializing the Specialized

I had no idea what Crowdsourcing was, neither does spell check. Heres the Wikipedia.com definition
neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).


Ok so what newspapers are doing now is taking a story and spreading it out to more people. I don't get why they can't just have one person right it. I understand if it is the cure for Cancer where a collective group of people might need to work on something but thats not what they are doing. They are going to all put bits of information into a story. I see the pros as someone might have an additional information on the subject but I feel if someone is specialized on it they already have enough sufficient information.

I can see this just as a slower process and words getting jumbled and information to be all over the place. What do I know I don't make millions of dollars.

Happy Easter!
Jesus has Rising and he is ready to DANCE

I'm Famous

Not to self publicize but only to show an example of great blogging I have posted a link to Dan Steinbger Washington Post Blog that coincidentially talks about the basketball team's playoff run and oh look at that ME.
American U.Questions Answered

Teamming up

Teams is something I've been able to avoid until college. I mean yeah I was on the track team but thats an individual sport. Rarely did you have to rely on the other teammates for success. Now at American University we are always together and must use each other to push and succeed. Even though we are racing each other and actually trying to beat each other at the same time beating ourselves this isn't the hard part of college. I hate group projects. Who doesn't right? I love the idea you can meet new people and they usually are fun ideas. But I hate when you get that guy. If you don't know who that guy is it is probably you. That guys is the guy who doesn't do the work and leaves it to the smart hard worker to do for them(I am neither.) Then there is that girl. That girl is the girl who tries to take charge of the group and then you realize to yourself, "This girl doesn't know anything and I hate her, at least that guy doesn't show up and leaves us alone." I hate that girl more then I hate that guy.

A website that helps people figure out what they should look to build a team that is actually worth reading is this one; How to Pick Your Million Dollar Crew

Great starter

1. Your greatest plan is only as strong as your weakest link.
2. You don’t know what you don’t know
   

This can go in so many ways. READ IT THAT GIRL AND STOP RUINING GROUPS. If you don't know who that one is, its probably you.



Reference: The Picture came from here http://portfolio.rimestimes.net/teach.htm group projects are truly awesome.

Busy Networking

It seems to get a job you need to know somebody. That was the case for my internships and people who I've asked most of the times had some kind of familiar connection that led them to that job.

Now with college coming to a terrible end I have started to use my connections to meet the demise of the real world. Several friends and one brother have offered to look into helping me out if I would want to work with them. These options are key to really finding a job you want instead of being forced somewhere you may not have picked if you had other choices.

Some people have great resume boasters and really know where they want to work and have a set plan for after college. Not everyone has this though. I thought this article:
Networking for Students- A Step By Step Guide
has some great advice for defining what you want to do, how you will go about it, and how to keep in touch. I do a terrible job with putting in the effort to reaching out and keeping networks.


Another website Business Network Advice who interviews Ryan Mapes an entrepreneur had this to say:

Ryan Mapes: This list is endless! But, the biggest mistake I see is a lack of follow-up after meeting someone. If you meet an important contact and exchange business cards, be sure to send a quick email when you get back to the office. This can help solidify the relationship and open up the doors for further correspondence down the road. People commonly let important contacts go stale because they haven't made contact with the person for several years after they initially met. Don't let this happen! Again, a simple email once every few months will go a long way.

I think we overlook the idea of how easy and simple it is to keep shooting emails to keep in touch with those who can help us down the road.
Hey look even Alan Greenspan has a few words.

Picture Ref: http://jayderagon.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/online_business_networking.jpg

Facebooked Forever

I have a little disclaimer I just got off a four hour bus ride and a weekend of racing in track. I don't want to be here right now.

Update from last week: My class and I spent a few hours in Second Life and had a lot of fun. Like Steph said it isn't too bad. I will be deleting it because since I downloaded it my computer has been extremely slow.

The next thing I will talk about is putting information on the web more specifically Facebook. Most people in college like myself have facebook. Here it started out with college students, then high schoolers and now everybody can be on it. Now the question is can we really get away from it as some people are trying to do with how they are starting to lose their privacy.

An article, How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free
talks about how you cant delete your membership. The guy talks about how hard he tried he coudln't
At first I was like wait what. That can't be good. I thought of the most inappropriate pictures of me on facebook and thought of them being there forever. that isn't good.


then I thought of the picture of jackie a few post down and said, maybe it isn't that bad and laughed.

I then read this:

“I thought it was kind of strange that they save your information without telling you in a really clear way,” said Magnus Wallin, a 26-year-old patent examiner in Stockholm who founded a Facebook group, “How to permanently delete your facebook account.” The group has almost 4,300 members and is steadily growing.

And realized from how it sounded the guy just did it wrong. I remember I tried deleting it freshman year, lasted a week and then got back on it and was happy it was still the same. So 4,300 people in a little group compared to about 6 million on the site, I think facebook is doing an alright job so far. I block my privacy settings and only my friends can see it. If they take that away however then it'll be time for me to leave facebook for good.

I thought this was stupid but I put it in because I didn't want to go through anymore terrible videos watch if you dare.

Second Life? I have enough on the First.

Alright so my class forced me to make a SecondLife account. If you don't know what it is heres an introduction



Before you make fun like I do this is what the article
More Internet Users Get a Virtual Life says:

Estimates vary on how popular the virtual worlds will become. Technology
research firm Gartner forecast this year that by 2011, 80 percent of active
Internet users will have a "second life" in some sort of virtual world. Another
research company, eMarketer, predicted last month that more than half of U.S.
children and teens who use the Internet - about 20 million people - will visit
virtual worlds by 2011.

I always wondered how these things actually worked but I figured it was for geeks and fat creepy men who use a female alias to do terrible things. So I set it up and spent about four hours setting up a person going through the tutorial FLYING it was good stuff. This was about a week ago and I haven't really touched it since. Why?

I found out to get clothes or build houses and actually do things on these programs you have to spend Linden's which is money, that you buy for real money. You either put money on your account or get a JOB in you're second life to get money to dress this character, you.

I looked this over and said to myself. Why would I want to do this. I avoid getting a job in the real world because it is boring or spend money for that matter. Why would I want to have to do it twice. I have enough going on in my own life to have to deal with a panda looking me. And you know who deals with this. People who are so weird they can't leave there house because people are afraid to meet them. Or they aren't the girl with her stuff hanging out with designer clothes. No it's a fat guy with a stained wifebeater hunched in a gamer chair. That won't work for me.

Internet Waz Here! LOL

The internet has shown it's advantages and disadvantages. The ability to receive information is tremendous.
My coach was sitting with us watching the Superbowl and asked me a question about the Rolling Stones and their concert where the Hell's Angle stabbed the young man in the middle of the concert. I started to look up Wikipedia and my coach replied "THE INTERNET?! THATS CHEATING! We use to use our brains to remember this curse."
This information is so easy to obtain the question is if we retaining it anymore or have we gotten so spoiled we don't even bother.

I read the article Nobel Laureate Says The Internet Makes Us Dumb, We Say: Meh
and it got me thinking that the internet should be used as a spark for information but not as the only source. We need to look up information online to build interest but then go and physically account it. We should still go to the library and read the books that go more indebt or see the countries we read about in these stories and blogs. An interesting quote caught me.

Whilst it may be easy to mock the utterances of hundreds of millions of bloggers and social networking site users, the 21st century will be remembered as the time that communication was democratized, a time where the power of a few was replaced by the power of many.

Communication has been taken out of the hands of few however it has been put in the hands of many who can't really handle it at times. After watching how people pick there presidents and people in mass crowds its so hard to trust those who aren't qualified and how do we know we can trust them for giving us all the information?

Oh and the answer to the Rolling Stones concert was Altamont Free Concert if you didn't take the two seconds already to find out.

I also used spell check about 10 times in this post, my spelling has become atrocious (i spelled that right.)

Who is This

Its Jackie, one of my inner circle friends. I think you should read her post not only because they are fantastic, but because they were made by a girl who has pictures like this of her circulating the internet.

Customize Kicks and Such

I read this article, Nike's New Public Design Studio -- Where Consumers Become Designers

It talks about how Nike now is using there NikeID shoes that you customize in the stories online. In track man everyone wanted those kind of shoes with there names on with funky colors. I've checked the website and it had little appeal to me I didn't like it. I did however go to Vans and bought some nice shoes because they had more of an artistic style to them making them more like your own.

Vans Customize
thats the website i made the pink with pink skulls cus thats how I get down. you do you.

I feel if stores are now helping people customize there shoes in person they should take it a step further.

Why don't they have artist come to stores and paint the shoes or put on artistic designs in person. This would come with an obvious high price tag but I think it would be cool. I know they do some stuff like this in the city where there are one of a kind shoes but I like the idea of it being like a tattoo on the shoe. You come in buy the shoe and have an image or color scheme you would want placed on the shoe. They could then take this and put it even online where you can have a paint brush and basically paint the shoe or find images you can place on them. I like it maybe I should give Phil Knight a call?

Just Leave Me Alone

I look for any reason to quote Michael Jackson and even put up pictures of him. I think he is innocent and a great artist but I can't go into that because I write too long post as it is.


What I really mean with that title is how marketing keeps finding new ways to try and bring me in to buying something. The marketers have abused our trust with these terrible ideas to sell us there products. How do we know if it is truly a product that can work. All these info commercials with these terrible actors telling me this product REALLY works. OR these pop up ads when I'm on the computer that say I won a new reward. I can't watch tv shows because ads take up 15 minutes of a 30 minute show. This has lead to the normal consumer becoming a zombie and un-fazed by these terrible advertisements and now these companies are looking to save themselves.

I read this article, Conversational Marketing Asks "Can We Talk?" By Jack Myer
http://www.mediavillage.com/jmr/2006/08/16/jmr-08-16-06/

"Conversational marketing allows you to start the conversation, listen and react," she explains. "Because you are listening you can add layers that make sense to the individual. It's about using consumer created content to engage in a conversation with an individual."

So they are saying the company itself will start talking to me? I don't know like I said I don't trust these guys, they'll outsource this conversation to some other country who will answer our questions in a generic form. These companies haven't cared about the individual because they don't need to people will buy anything, Brittney Spears still sells CDS.

I like these new ideas where we in some way take out the middle man of advertisement and listen to one another. These social retailing sites like Kaboodle put a bunch of items together from different websites and we can get feedback from people who bought them without having to deal with the wishy washy actors telling us how they are real people who really love it.

I'd trust some of these companies if they used Michael Jackson to sell their products...
and ONLY Michael Jackson.

Social Network Six Degrees

I googled social netoworking to find a cool picture to put up so I put this picture to the left but this was not the first image that came up. The first image was three lovely ladies with things on their body placed there surgically. I was going to put it up and say hey this is what google told me was social networking but figured I am getting graded on this so I'll keep it PG. However, if that is what Social Networking is about, I'm pretty excited to get reading about this topic.

I read the first article Six Myths About Informal Networks-and How to Overcome Them by Rob Cross, Nitin Nohria and Andrew Parker, because I was lazy, I connected with some of the points and figured I could make some thoughts.

Following those tips advice I will pick a certain topic in each paper and examine it the most. I relate to these kind of topics through the internships I had and also what really hits home would be my track team.

Myth: Build a better network, we have to communicate more:

I would consistently delete emails from people in the Finance department I worked at because they would forward them to everyone who it could relate to. I got to the point I was probably deleting emails that would actually benefit me because I was so use to them being useless information. If they made sure they were sent to people that it would actually matter to, then people would read more of the emails. Other then that it felt like spam. Same thing with the regular Monday meetings. I think it is a good idea to have open communication but not people patting themselves on the back and looking for something to talk about. It wasn’t communicating more from each person but just the people who seem to think they know everything talk about nothing.

My track team there isn’t much communicating with our coach this lets us learn from the mistakes we make, With him everything we do is a mistake and when its discussed there isn’t much communication. It more is in the lines of him yelling for 45 minutes and you saying “Yes Coach, No coach, Because I’m a (bad word) coach.”

The problem with there reality check of building a better network focus on who knows what is stupid. To find out who knows what you have to talk to everyone and make your way through those who are talking out of something other then there mouths and those who know it but can’t speak because that other guy won’t shut up. A good manager should be able to see through this quickly and find the person and after a while know who to go to first.

I went down and read the articles and tried to find a few that had interesting titles and found the second article coincidentally as an eye catching title. The People Who Make Organizations Go-Or Stop, by Rob Cross and Laurence Prusak. I wondered if the article would talk about characteristics and tell where a person with my personality would fit in with the growth of an organization. The article wasn’t about this and was boring but I read into it and didn’t want to keep searching for articles.

My problem with this analysis of connections was how they don’t go into how people have what seems to be a natural ability to be in the know and what kind’ve characteristics fit into this mold of being someone who knows who to know and why. The article seems to be more geared on connections as something of a job title and forced responsibility as much as a way people learn to interact with others. I’d find an article more interesting if they went into why and how those who have the social networking knowledge came about with the ability to know more then others.

I’m tired and that article took a lot out of me and I’m not following the guidelines to writing good articles because this has gotten long. I also have to be up early tomorrow to run in the frigid cold which might be worse then the long run we had to do this afternoon with the wind blowing. I cried on the inside.

The last article I read was A Practical Guide to Social Networks by Rob Cross (who seems to have writing everything), Jeanne Liedtka, and Leigh Weiss.

What I found important was the different kinds of social networks of Customized Response Modular Response, and Routine Response. I looked at it and tried to figure which network I would wish to belong to. I was able to immediately take out routine response. Imagine everyday solving familiar problems with responses you already know that are efficient, consistent and are all internal. So cross that off.

Then its between customized and modular. Both are tough problems but customized you must find innovative solutions, thinking outside the box while modular is you know the problem just how to go about it. The network connections for customized are dense and redundant which could be tough if you don’t like who you’re talking to or if they aren’t holding up there side is tough to deal with. Modular you can adapt roles and change positions to get a response. I decided to go with customized figuring you get something new everyday to try and figure out which would sound fun. I won’t ruin it by saying what examples are for each group it is at the bottom of the graph on page 3. I’ll just send a link maybe help those looking for a job who are wondering what environment they would feel comfortable in.

http://sixdegrees.wikidot.com/local--files/reading-history/practicalguide.pdf

There was an interview with Rob Cross the guy who wrote most the articles on Social Network I read its short and interesting I’d recommend reading it.

https://blackboard.american.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_42368_1%26url%3D

Why I'm Here

Hey I'm writing a blog for my class at American. This is a class which entails the learning of social networking based on six degrees. This is out of the realm of my major in accounting so I hope it is fun. Hopefully I'm not the stereotypical accounting who looks at things one way.

We have topics that the class has to discuss so it will keep me from going off in tangents however I will try to put in my own ideas and how I feel about these topics.

“On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own”