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)."

is the world really that small?

reading up on Kadushin's article posted on blackboard it was interesting to see how small the world is. the eye catching beginning to a paragraph which said "If there were no overlap in people’s personal networks, then one could reach the entire population of the
United States in two or three steps. (Pool and Kochen 1978). " I was frankly frightened by that fact, but in reality, in contrast, the world is huge. Last class i'm sure everybody remembers using that Small World Project website hosted by Columbia University in NYC and let me tell you something....this ain't no small world. As my people to connect to I had some 60 year old lady living in the United States Virgin Islands....I think the closes i came was being in the U.S.V.I. on a cruise a couple years back, other than that I couldn't think of a single person who I actually knew firsthand who might actually be connected to Agnes out in the U.S.V.I..

Still think the world is small? Consider this -- over 6,000 people PER DAY die in car accidents in the United States alone. If the world was that small, then I figure myself or a friend would know at least one of these people....but NO, no sign of connection or poor friends or family that died today in a car accident.

As I was reading the article on blackboard I also found an article in my defense which states how the world isn't too small after all from an IT perspective! Better yet- this article came from an IT Blog called ITToolbox --- Check it out here!

though this was a short post I feel as if reading the article linked above will give everybody the other side of the Small World argument. And if it fails to counter the argument posed in the reading as well as the small world project then it does provide some interesting reading material from an IT sense. Please feel free to respond to this post and the linked article I thought might be interesting especially for all you business majors out there!

blogs never sieze to amaze me....

ok. well i sat down to write this blog post after reading the selected chapters in "The Hidden Power of Social Networks" and "Smart Mobs". In between reading the chapters and actually writing in this blog I went on to one of the social networks/blogs that I read on a daily basis. For privacy purposes I won't disclose this particular blog at the current time. However, I was reading posted articles from today and I came across an article entitled "Seattle dealership rips off disabled man." While reading the headline I was thinking about a girl I dated last year from AU whose father owned a few dealerships in the Seattle area....low and behold. It was a dealership that her father was part-owner of. On the blog entry I was reading was an link to a Seattle newspaper with a picture of her parents on it. CRAZY. I will now go into the importance and effectiveness of social networking however, I thought this might be a rather relevant story to share with the class while on the topic of social connection through blogs and networks. Clearly, this exemplified the 6 Degrees of Separation topic of our class and how strange it is that I found this on a blog I read which practically quotes a girl whom has now transferred but I was dating only a year ago.

...Now on to some intelligent discussion:

From reading the chapters assigned for class I pulled a few major point which really struck me as important and the true reasons why I personally love to read blogs which interest and pertain to me (like the one listed (or rather unlisted) above). Since I've already started off this blog entry on a personal note -- for the day, i'll keep it that way.

A quote from "The Hidden Power of Social Networks" states that "engineers and scientists were roughly five times as likely to turn to a personal for information as to an impersonal source such as a database or a file cabinet..."

This is 100% true. The reason I read blogs is because I read the ones that interest me, and it serves as a newspaper which only focuses on one of the things I love -- such as cars. Sure, I can read the NY Times, or the Washington Post, but if I love cars, how many articles are going to talk about cars directly 1? 2 if i'm lucky? The beauty of social networks and blogs is that they are so personalized that reading a car blog for me is like a NY Times without the stuff I don't care about like....politics, the price of houses in Bobsville, Missouri...a State Rep who used state funds to buy a cottage... Hope that wasn't too ignorant of a comment. It all boils down to the availability of specialized knowledge and information which can only be found online through blogs and social networks, the NY Times or Washington Post is great if want to know what's going on in politics or global warming for the day, but if I want the latest information on technology or cars I turn to the social world online. For such reasons above, social networks and the opportunity to be anonymous are great ways to find specialized information about virtually anything you want to know...anything you're trying to do....or anything you want to discuss.

If anybody has any feedback on this -- feel free to respond.