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?