its all about who you know...and how well you know them.

networking. the single most important thing to do in business.

benefits of networking:
finding:
- customers
- clients
- partners
- employees
- manufacturers
- investors
- babysitters
- internships
- jobs
- opportunities
- a wife/husband
...and the list goes on.

bottom line is that networking is the way you meet people. whether you're at the campus cafeteria and you meet a friend through another friend, or you're at one of those Kogod sponsored networking receptions....the person you meet in Terrace Dining Room may be more, less, or un-important as the big business man you met at the reception. personally, i feel that there is no harm in meeting people and from everybody you meet, chances are that you'll grasp or think about at least one thing they did or said...or get one internship, or meet one person they know which will change your life in some way.

as far back as I can remember....every job i've ever had was because of a connection i've made, most times, somebody i knew who knew somebody else passed my resume along...or somebody my parents knew had some tie to something.

"It's not what you know, but who you know." (Don't know who said that..its just a cliche, but a true one at that.)

story time:
so remember that flight i was on last week from Madrid to JFK? yea--the one that caught on fire. well, i was sitting next to women who was an IT major at University of Michigan and now works for Nokia in the technology department. She basically talks to third party vendors and finds software for nokia to use with their phones....well yea, we schmoozed. And I got her card and emailed her and....lets hope I have an internship with Nokia next summer!
(no bull)

to conclude my argument on the importance of making connections and networking.....no matter who is or where you are, we all have something to gain from one and other, whether it be one of those things i listed in the beginning...or even finding out something you don't want to do or somewhere you don't want to work. I interned last fall at Simon Property Group in Arlington, VA....and though the stuff they had me doing was tedious (I was a marketing specialization at the time)....the internship was successful. It was successful because I was able to realize what i didn't want to do...marketing. therefore, even if what you get from meeting somebody is not a positive experience, chances are you'll benefit in some way.

linked here is an article I found which is relevant to my discussion and this week's reading entitled "It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in The Information Age"

blogging for a purpose

rather than reflecting on blogging and its connection and effect on politics this post is an experiment. Over spring break five of my friends and I decided to do an alternate spring break trip and venture to Spain with nothing but airline tickets and apartment and hostel reservations. Surprisingly, we made great use of all our days abroad and saw what there was to see in the cities as far as official tourism as well as a fair share of things that the Spanish government doesn’t support nor seem to prosecute – like hookers, beer vendors, and drug dealers who line “Las Ramblas” any night after about 1AM. Needless to say, with six best friends in Spain for eight days we had an awesome trip, however, the airline was the only damper. Anyway—the experiment I was going for in this blog was to post about my horrible experience on Iberia Airlines with a picture and see what kind of out-of-class reaction this can/ or will stir up.

on the way to Barcelona, other than about four gate changes connecting in Madrid to reach Barcelona and rude flight attendants – everything went fairly smoothly, that is, other than the landing in Barcelona. The only time I feel Iberia really screwed up was with the flight from Madrid back to JFK. After arriving at the airport we all check in at the ticket counter and are told that since the flight was oversold we don’t have seats and had to take all of our luggage and standby vouchers to a customer service desk. The good news is—they were able to get us seats. Arriving at the gate the flight was delayed 30 minutes for maintenance reasons and then we were able to board the plane. Everything goes smoothly…we take off, and then about 8 minutes later the pilot comes over the P.A. telling us that one of our engines overheated and we need to make an emergency landing back in Madrid. As we touch the ground the aircraft was surrounded by emergency vehicles (fire, police, ambulance) and then we were asked to disembark the plane. Here’s a picture I took from the jet-bridge as we were going back into the airport:




As it turned out, one of the engines had overheated, caught on fire, and was sprayed down by the fire crew. I would think that if they knew it was a problem they wouldn’t put some duct take on and send us on our way across the Atlantic…maybe its just standard procedure. After two hours of sitting in the Airport we were finally able to board a new aircraft and make our way to New York. My friends and I are still trying to come up with an acronym for I B E R I A. Any ideas?

Incompetently
Bringing
Everybody
Roughly
Into
Airports

Hopefully this will let the company know that they really need to get their act together, and possibly some free tickets to Spain for myself? Come on Iberia ....challenge my blog!

tom kyte & his second life/(job)

tom's presentation to the class was great in that we spoke to and met first hand one of the largest bloggers on the web. it was interesting to hear blogging from his point of view and hear about his beginnings in blogging on cnet news groups.

one of my favorite parts of the lecture was when he showed us a few of the websites that he gets his news from including FARK.COM which I thought was hilarious and read it on a daily basis now.

Aside from tom kyte, tomorrow I will be giving a presentation on Second Life. after spending a lot of time playing the game and becoming familiar with it, it is really impressive all that can be done in the game. With Dell Island, American Apparall Store, and millions of users, business, and services available there is so much to be done, learned, and profited on.

....i can't believe that in this day in age it is possible for one to profit off of a virtual reality. Sim city was one thing where users throughout the world had the ability to interact with each other and live together in another life. I was reading an article about Anshe Chung who was the first man to make $1,000,000 on Second Life. Check out the article from "Business Week"

let me know what you guys think about this new ability to make money in second life.

Do Small Indepndent e-commerce Stores Have a Chance?

reading "Are Online Reputations Portable?" from business week not only got me thinking about how powerful reputations are on eBay, but it made me go off track and think about the reputations of small independent e-commerce retailers...once in a while everybody goes on to google and types in an item they're looking to buy and one of the first links is one of these independent e-tailers...for example, if i want to buy a laptop battery for my computer i typed "buy laptop battery" into google and one of the first links that came up was www.batteryvalues.com here's my issue: you go to the site and it looks like it was made in 1999 for starters...then if I weren't so bias I might go ahead and look at the site but i'm just not sure if i trust it.

when i buy things on eBay the good news is I do have the ratings...but that eBay scale of reputation really doesn't go beyond eBay itself. unfortunately on batteryvalues.com doesn't have an area on their page where there are thousands of customer reviews and if they did, i'm not so sure they'd include the negatives! IM SORRY! I just need the reassurance of "A++++++ SELLER, FAST SHIPPING + GREAT PRODUCT!!!!". Sad, but I don't think i'm alone when I like that reassurance.

going back to the battervalues.com example, for multiple reasons I don't think that i'm highly likely to go on a website i've never heard of before and enter my credit card information. i'm not a big fan of website where i think i'm going to pay and pray that it comes within the next month. this said, i feel as if all of the small independent e-tailers that had been prevalent on the web landscape for years and soon going to diminish. just like on land where Wal-Marts and Super-Duper-Everything-Stores begin to dot the landscape and in turn Joe Bob's Mom & Pop Grocery Shop begin to turn into a Wal-Mart, or maybe one aisle within....as huge e-stores such as Amazon, OverStock, even Wal-Mart begin to gain support (as they already have) don't you think stores like batteryvalues.com and other sites like buy rite electronics have an end in sight? though one can argue that its easier to compete online without a storefront because of less overhead costs that it must still be heard to earn a good living competing against fortune 500 companies traded on the NYSE or NASDAQ?

Do you think that the trend of mom and pop shops being closed by Wal-Marts opening on main street will continue on e-street?

Let me know what you think?

i digg it...

before reading the article I was already extremely familiar with Digg. not only is it a great news source but it was an idea that somebody thought of which costs next to nothing to create, and as the economist states--its now worth about 200 million. pretty crazy.

as i'm already particularly familiar with digg.com i think i'm going to venture off topic and talk about the future. smart mobs brings up the future and how within two minutes somebody who was walking in NYC got a message on their cell phone that the first sept. 11 plane had hit. is this the future? NOT ANYMORE!

so these days we vote on the news everybody reads (pretty democratic), many of us carry our lives in our pockets with our PDAs and Blackberrys....email, telephone, web browsing, chatting, instant messaging, phone book, you name it...possibilities with technology are endless. so this brings me to my question-what's next? Sure there's going to be better websites which start popping out of your computer screen, and make food for you, but as far as computer technology, what will we be able to do with out computers in 20 years?

So far in this class we have already shown how these days you can:
- Vote on the news
-Control your life with your PDA
-Reach millions of people with a blog
-Market a product with a blog
-Find user reviews and best prices on products (with a blog too!)

while i was thinking about what capabilities we now have just as a result of blogs I went online and looked to find an article about the future of blogging. Though the article is entitled "The Future of the Blog" it doesn't directly answer that question. However, after reading this article from Business Week it is interesting to hear about the beginning of blogging as well as the challenges blog hosts face, the myths of blogging, their design issues, and most importantly, how bloggs effect societal views. If you have a minute check it out.

As I conclude, please provide me with how YOU THINK blogs of the future will differ from...this very blog or those viewed today?
....to get you thinking maybe the ability for a user to upload songs and movie clips using this simplistic blogger?

PLEASE COMMENT and let me know what you think!

Blogs: Good or Bad for Corporate Giants?

some of the posted readings for tomorrow's class were based upon the way large corporations could benefit or be at a disadvantage as a result of the blogosphere we live in today. the article along with the other article on the Business Week website highlights how users utilize bloggs and other forms of social networks to gang up and discuss issues they have regarding products, services, or the quality of a company. the internet and in blogs specifically are the first place where customers or people who own the same products from all over the country and the world can get together and openly discuss something. the beauty of it is that chances are that one of the people who is having the issue might be a specialist in that certain field of technology....this possibility often provides solutions to a common problem people seem to have with the same product or service. For example, the article in the Financial Times posted as a link in the syllabus speaks of a Verizon Motorola V710 cell phone. It talks about how VZW decided to ban bluetooth file transfer between the users' PC and their Motorola device. Users complained to the company and blogged about the issue online. Soon enough, a computer or cell phone genius in this case came up with a way to connect the phone to the computer using loopholes in the block. prior to the advent and high use of bloggs and online open forums no solution or group lawsuit could be filed. I was one of these users, whom found this blog using google and was again able to connect my phone to the computer to transfer files via bluetooth. Companies can be hurt by negative press which flows on bloggs between users...however, if users love products then blogs could really enhance the image of the product and give raving reviews on products that are not widely known. After reading this post, please vote by clicking the link below and if you care to-- explain your answer as a comment. Thanks!

http://snappoll.com/poll/169988.php

its not all about the microchips and web standards...

i usually start my posts with a quote, though it might cliche i feel as if it sets the tone and subject of the discussion early on in the game....

"The personal computer and the Internet would not exist as they do today without extraordinary collaborative enterprises in which acts of cooperation were as essential as microprocessors." (Rheingold 47).

keeping this blog entry short and sweet i feel as if sometime we tend to overlook the fact that its not the technological innovations and software advance which has brought the Internet to where it is today...its you....its me...its nearly every computer user throughout the world. Whether we look at the commerce that online community has bread through online retailers like Amazon, auction websites like eBay, and community commerce such as CraigsList...or we just look at news, blog, and other community supported web developments. What I have gained from reading this passage in the Mobs book...is that everything, including the blog for this class has only become what it has because of the users whom interact and make the internet what it is today. Without social networks and niches within the blogging community and virtually anywhere on the net....the internet and the accessibility given to its users would not exist today and would certainly not have brought the full value which it does to our lives on a daily basis. whether I'm searching for a product on eBay or amazon....or looking for the latest car information...the information i request or seek would not be available to me today if it weren't for the users throughout the world. though microprocessors and broadband connection does speed the process up, without social networks and e-communities, the internet would not be as successful and vibrant as it is today.

after watching the optional panel videos from the university of santa clara...i truly believe in this final statement:

"The foundations of the Internet were created by the community of creators as a gift to the community of users (Rheingold, 48)."