Hal-A-Lu-Yer

So I am silently rejoicing that the FCC is doing something good for the consumer for a change!!! WOO. As many of my classmates who live in large apartment buildings have realized. Certain cable or satellite companies can basically buy out entire multi-dwelling building and be the sole provider of television and the consumer has no other option but to go with them. But if it is approved on Wednesday cable companies will no longer be able to monopolize entire buildings, giving consumers the chance to pick their supplier based on their own criteria (usually price).

I am honestly happily amazed that the FCC is looking out for consumers in this way. The only real purpose of doing this is to lower industry prices and thank goodness! I just auto-paid my cable bill and it was $57 and change. I can't think about this too long or I may call up DirecTV and flip out on them or just cry over the wasted money.

Have We Met?

Business Networking as Boston.com reports can be intimidating for us college students. Why do we have such anxieties towards business networking when social networking is our forte? In my eyes there are two reasons people use networking to get jobs.

1. To connect to companies that you otherwise would have no access to
2. To have a person who can vouch for you when trying for that new job.

But there is a third "mystery" reason that isn't talked about much and it's the reason I believe many people are afraid of business networking.

3. It will help get a job that you otherwise would NEVER be considered for. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing for us, but it is a bad thing when you are the person who is qualified but the step-half nephew of so and so got the job instead.


I've only discussed this with a hand full of people because you never know who is working solely due to their connections and not because of their smarts.

BUT

Of those people, I know they do have moral issues with this. We want to get our job based on our abilities and personality not because we "know" someone.

.......

I have never gotten a good job through business networking. Allow me to list them off:
-Grocery store clerk
-Gift shop wench
-fax/copy machine extraordinaire at a non-profit

But I do believe business networking is important purely for finding jobs that aren't listed. And I think it can be done in a way where you won't feel guilty later. Just use the people you meet as a conduit for your resume. If they don't know you in a way where they could discuss your work ethic, etc then let them know that you don't want them to be a fake reference for you. Maybe they'd respect that? Not sure. If your past boss or manager is referring you to a new job then it makes perfect sense to have him or her vouch for you. If it's your Uncle or cousin there may be too much family bias built in for you to feel good later about it.

Maybe I am too naive about this topic but I can dream can't I?

Calling all Six-Degree'rs

My beau and I plan on moving to California when I graduate but we don't know exactly where yet. So to help our decision I've been looking to see if there are jobs in specific cities. Doing all this got me thinking about my resume and what I'll be adding to it by the time I graduate.

I was contemplating whether it would be a good idea or not to include my blog (with the URL) because I am proud of my writings and the level of integrity (and traffic! haha).

BUT...

Is it too risky because I do put my own opinions in there that can be a little controversial?

My question to all of you:

-Have you considered listing your blog in your resume?
-Do you think it's a good idea?
-Could it be detrimental to our future careers?

I'd love to hear everyone's opinion on this so please comment!!

Collaborate and Listen!

In my generation we have been utilizing collaborative tools from the moment they appeared on the scene. Chat rooms, message boards, forums, you name it, we embraced it. It seems that if you look to a generation or so older than us you find different sentiment and experiences. Someone expressed in a comment on Teamwork, Supercharged from Newsweek that such technologies have been around for awhile and the only real difference is the new and improved ease of use.

If you read any articles commenting on such products as Basecamp, Campfire, and Google Docs they seem amazed with them (and yes they are amazing tools) and frequently they comment on how companies are at first reluctant to use them, instead wanting to have physical meetings, see physical documents. How archaic huh?

A huge reason why these tools are becoming so popular and will eventually grow to be a huge $$ making industry is because: it saves space, it saves paper, it allows one current copy to be accessible to everyone who's involved. The best case for this I saw in a video that our classmate Allie (HJ) showed to us in our Database class, if you take a few minutes to watch it you'll be a believer.

Today almost every website has an aspect of collaboration, it's becoming the norm. Websites are no longer purely information sources made by one group or one person they are ongoing conversations that need to be constantly updated and improved. Perhaps information changes too quickly for one person to keep up.

I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY

Have you ever noticed that when you hear about one random topic all of a sudden the next 10 things you hear about relate to it?

As some of you might know, I'm an avid Oprah viewer and yesterdays episode was about American families who have gotten themselves in massive debt. The guest star was my favorite person, Suze Orman who is a financial guru and has had her own financial T.V. show for years.

I also (along with most people I know) am a huge fan of the show The Office, and last night a good portion of the episode was about getting into debt... weird huh?

So my focus on this post is on avoiding financial ruin.

I went to High School in New York State in a small village (not city) and the only aspect of finance we were taught about was one day when a teacher told us that if we invest our money in a mutual fund we could one day be millionaires. -- Not exactly the most useful information, but it caught my interest nonetheless.

Considering many people who I went to school with weren't going to be supported by their parents much longer after graduating and also weren't going to be going to college it would've been very helpful to have more information on personal finance.

Despite new bankruptcy reform laws the number of households filing is growing. How many of these people are bankrupt due to life's circumstances (sickness, death, job loss) and how many are due to mismanagement of money?

If my passion for personal finance lasts over the years, my goal is to go to high schools and maybe middle schools and teach responsible personal finance practices.

How many of you feel that you would've been better financially if it had been taught to you in High School? Or maybe earlier?

Is Best Buy About To Go Out Of Business?

Perhaps some of you indie-rock fans had heard about the band Radiohead giving their album out for free from their website instead of charging $$. The main reason this is getting the publicity that is it is because despite the fact that the album was free, more people pirated the album than downloading it FOR FREE from radioheads site. "Experts" (and myself) say that it's because people are just used to downloading the albums they want from places such as Bit Torrent etc and their actions were not intended to be a slap in the face to Radiohead's efforts.

What interests me is not solely the fact that more people pirated it, rather it's the question of the future of music sales.

Most of us know that bands/artists do not make much if any money off of CD sales, their primary income comes from shows and endorsements. While some bands ::cough cough:: Metallica don't condone fans "stealing" or pirating their music others, System of a Down and obviously Radiohead are more accepting of this reality. How many more artists will follow suit and stop selling their albums and start giving their music away? Hopefully more. In my eyes music isn't about greed, rather sharing your abilities, gifts, ideas, talent, etc.

When the RIAA sues some average Joe for downloading a few thousand songs do the artists get that money? I don't know for sure but I doubt it, my instincts tell me that the record companies get it.

I am optimistic that more artists will be giving their music away "for free", after all isn't it a compliment to them when we go to any means possible to get their music, even if that means risking law suits?

If I ever for some reason got sued for the music I downloaded back in the Napster days I would personally write a letter to every artist and ask them if they cared that I downloaded their music instead of purchasing a CD (which often I did after sampling their music), then we'd see how that suit would end up. Our justice system is only changed when a precedent is set and someone needs to do that soon.

A Tiny Blurb

Today was pretty good I must admit. During our six degrees class today we had Tom Kyte (VP of Oracle) speak, which was very interesting. And during his presentation he noted a few of our blogs and pointed out my last post! I was/am way too ecstatic about it, but I thought I'd note it anyway and hopefully that will give me some online credibility haha.

John Q Public -- Double Agent

Imagine me rolling my hands over themselves like an evil scientist.. that's how I felt (and sort of what I did) when I read Startups Help Clean Up Online Reputations

In a nutshell the article is about how your online reputation effects your real-life reputation. For instance all your crazy college (or high school) partying pictures being found by a potential employer and due to that you are denied a job. Or... grounded by your mom.

The article also mentioned a few sites which focus on helping "the common man" clean up their online image, (not that I want to endorse them) but Reputation Defender and Naymz mostly through getting rid of not-so flattering pictures online.

Admittedly this is a brilliant idea for a web start-up, your client base is almost endless and it hasn't been done before. Perfect.

BUT...

And I sort of hinted at this in my last post with my quotes from Waking Life-- taking responsibility for oneself. For these individuals who want to present themselves as mature adults or "clean living folks" and use these sites to clean up their image, what about living the way you want to be perceived?

Is it fair to live a double life? Furthermore is it honest? I'm not sure.

Recently I found pictures on facebook of a girl who I've known for a very long time, probably since she was a baby, she's underage and the pictures were of her drinking (in dorms nonetheless) and kissing and messing around with girls (she's not gay as far as I know). I thought those actions were things you were supposed to keep under raps, at least until you were legal to do so. Have we become too proud of the "deviant" things we do?

Before myspace and facebook and similar sites, were pictures being taken of the 'crazy' high school and college parties? Was it necessary since the pictures weren't traveling elsewhere?

And my last question of the day:

If we all are trying to clean up our online image will we eventually stop posting pictures everywhere? And end the need for those reputation fixing websites?


EDIT: A little birdie told me a few days ago that facebook is going to implement a feature to segment your profile. From what I heard there will be a "family" "friends" and "co-workers" version that you can create and label people in your network as. Perhaps that will solve some of the problems people are having with these sites as the first users of them grow up and start monitoring their ... employees, nieces, nephews, children etc.

What do we have to offer?

It's 11.3opm so we all know what that means don't we? It means our inhibitions are lowered, our honesty comes out and our creativity is at its peak. Or is that just me?

I think most of us go through our philosophical phase. Usually junior/senior year of High School others get delayed until early college and I suppose a choice few hold onto those questions their entire life.

When I was in High School, during I think my junior year I was hanging out with my then best friend Mariya and we watched the movie Waking Life together. My life was changed from that moment on. For those of you who haven't seen it, if you just purely listened to the movie, blindfolded perhaps, you would think it was a 1.5hr long philosophical rambling. If you view it with your eyes, it's quite the feast. It has possibly the most revolutionary animation used in a semi-popular movie--they loosely filmed live action and then animated over it.

Anyway...

Many of us taking this six degrees class are at the end of our college career, perhaps some of us will go on to grad school, but otherwise we're about to graduate. When I read the LiveJournal posts of some of my friends from High School who are about to graduate as well we all have the same underlining thoughts. Where are we going? and What's going to change?

So obviously I'm going through these thoughts and feelings as well and it brings me back to the end of High School when every breath I took was an embodiment of Waking Life. On one hand it makes me feel embarrassed to be almost back in the same mind-set as when I was finishing up High School but in my own defense this is the ending of a large portion of my life some of the same issues need to be readdressed.

I don't think I've met many if any students at AU that weren't incredibly ambitious. In my first semester two students on my dorm floor were already working in the White House pursuing their dreams of one day being a senator or even president.

Many of us may be asking ourselves now, what do we have to offer the world? Why are we better than another candidate for a job? Or, in terms of this class, why should I read your blog over someone else's?

What sets us apart from others? And who determines that? I hope I can determine that for myself. In all of our business classes we've heard over and over that a company/product has to be unique in some way in order to be successful. I'm trying to pinpoint that now.



"It's like your life is yours to create."

"we should never simply write ourselves off... and see ourselves as the victim of various forces it's always our decision who we are."

"I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately, the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life."

Shopping Revolutionized.

While reading the short chapter about how important tagging blogs, pictures, etc is in Naked Conversations I noticed riya.com. I leaned over to Kyle who's sitting at his computer right next to mine and asked him if he's ever heard about it. He then went to their website and discovered that a site he had introduced me to a long time ago is using riya's technology. The site is like.com and it's pretty revolutionary as far as shopping goes. The basic idea of the site is to take a general product you like and choose which features are important to you (color, shape, pattern) by weighting them. After you indicate your price range like.com will then suggest other items with those features that you requested. You can specify everything to your taste. No more searching site after site though pages of products that don't fit your criteria.

This technology is not only being used for shopping but also for photos-- personal and ones on the web.

If this technology is used elsewhere in our lives imagine all the time we can save and use to play second life instead? Ha!

A real shout out

I was very happy to see a comment from my online friend Beau. He is more of a professional blogger and heavy into politics, I suggest checking his stuff out (linked above)!

Just in case any of you were wondering Beau and I met probably about 5 years ago if not longer on Friendster.com he had been trying to find a high school friend who shares the same exact name as me! Since we have a few things in common we have kept in touch over the many years and I'm flattered that he would comment on my lil' ole blog! Thanks Beau!!

Second Life UPDATE!!!

It's crashed 15 times, it's distracted me from more important things in life, and I haven't accomplished anything yet.

Any guesses as to what I'm referring to?

SECOND LIFE... DING DING DING

I figured out that to leave the "Orientation Island" you must search for places you can teleport to. When I was looking for these places I found that there are a TON.. and I mean a TON of places that allegedly will pay you Linden Dollars to just hang out on their island, there was one I found that brought you to some website claiming that if you do online surveys they'll pay you a ton of Lindens. When I investigated this it seemed to look more like one of those "click here to win two free dinners at Olive Garden" so when it asked for my e-mail address, that was where I drew the line.

I was just about to figure out how what they call 'camping' will earn you Lindens when the game crashed again and I figured it'd be a good time to update all of you on my progress or lack their of.

More updates to come!