As if real life wasn't complicated enough....

Woah....talk about scary....have you heard of Second Life? I feel like a total dinosaur here (especially considering it was launched in 2003)....usually i'm very excited to learn about new technology and don't have too much trouble embracing it, but something about this virtual phenomena just frightens me. Have you watched the move Wall-E? Do you remember when you saw what the future was supposed to be like and it was quite disturbing? Well that's exactly how I felt after learning more about Second Life. Did you know that you can get married, get assaulted, and make millions all on SL? I'm still not able to fully grasp the Linden dollar and SL economy.

I didn't realize the magnitude of Second Life until I read that currently about 8.2 million young Internet users (or 24%), already check out the virtual world at least once a month. Additionally, Gartner has forecasted that by by 2011, 80% of active Internet users will have a "second life" in some sort of virtual world. That's less than 2 years away...

Ok so it didn't take me too long to get over my initial fear and once I calmed down a bit--I have to admit, I did think it was kinda cool. At first I just thought the point was to create a fantasy but there seems to be many applications for SL, including education which I thought was neat. Watch the video below for some educational uses:

I've only read about SL and can't really knock this technology until I've tried it. So I ask you out there---have you tried SL? I would love to hear about your experience so drop me a response. I wonder what my avatar would look like and and what would she do on SL. Would she be more interested in something totally fictional or an enhancement of something more realistic?

Second life is waaaaay more than an escape from reality, and I think that's what makes it so scary to me...there seems to be no limits as of now. Unfortunately, I barely have time to live my real life...so I can't imagine adding a virtual life to the mix.

The Internet is "making us dumb" & "killing our culture"???...perhaps these proclaimers are just afraid of change!

Of course, as with everything in life, there are people that love it and those that hate it. In this case, it happens to be the internet. I personally love it but can see how there are people out there who believe that the internet has the potential to make us "dumb", such as Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. I mean the internet is replacing the conventional methods of obtaining information and contains a lot of information that isn't necessarily accurate by any means. However, don't you agree that it's pretty close-minded to not consider the many benefits that the internet brings? The internet opens everyone up to so much information at the tap of a finger--information in the past that you may not have had access to or would have taken a while to obtain. Yes, there is a lot of garbage out there, but as George the blogger pointed out..."Like any other media, the internet is what you make of it. Claiming that it makes you dumb is like saying literature makes you stupid because my grocery store sells schlocky romance novels at the checkout counter."

Ok now what do you think about the proclaimation that internet is "killing our culture"? If anything, the internet brings culture from around the world to us. Andrew Keen seems to not thing so. The man even loathes wikipedia...how can you hate wikipedia?!?! Wikipedia and Google are my lifelines! Anyhow, if you haven't heard of Keen check out wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Keen

Keen has some rather interesting things to say about his views...check out the video below of when he appeared on the Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Andrew Keen
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

He also seems to have disdain for Web 2.0 primarily in that anyone can add content to the web. But isn't that the beauty of it? Do you really think that web content should be filtered by so-called experts? I do understand the concerns that the web is hurting many traditional forms of professional media such as print papers and forcing them to change. But is change always a bad thing? Yes, it can be painful, but it's essential to growth. To me, it seems that the people that oppose the openness of the web are just resistant to change and feel somewhat threatened. Technology in general has changed the world since as long as we can remember--whether it be the first automobile or the internet--and it will continue to change things so the best thing to do is embrace it!

It isn’t what you know, it’s who you're "LinkedIn" to....

When I first joined LinkedIn sometime two years ago, I just did it because a friend sent me a link in an email and told me to join. At that time I was growing bored with my membership to Friendster and had just started experimenting with Facebook and still knew very little about social networking sites, let alone understood their value. As probably most folks who sign up for the latest social networking site due to hype or just because you got that email from a friend or colleague, I realize that I do not fully understand and utilize the power of sites like LinkedIn. For those of you who may not know much about LinkedIn, it's basically a professional networking resource. Here are some interesting facts I pulled from one of LinkedIn's press releases that may intrigue you:

• LinkedIn is an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world, with over 38 million members representing 170 industries and 200 countries and territories.
• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and about half of our members are outside the U.S.
• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

Ok so I REALLY didn't understand the magnitude of LinkedIn's professional reach until I read this and other articles. Right now, it seems to me that LinkedIn is getting extra hype due to the depressed global economy and all of a sudden my otherwise dormant LinkedIn account is seeing a lot of activity and receiving an increasing number of messages from my connections, especially those searching for new career opportunities. I'm very fortunate to not be looking right now, but it's great to know that LinkedIn provides another avenue to market yourself and make the right connections right now, because you never know when you'll be in need of a new job (especially in today's economy) or just want a career change.

I first thought LinkedIn was just another way to post your resume online but it actually has a lot more applications--I didn't know you could recommend someone, post status updates, join groups, etc. I'm sure i'm just covering the basics so if anyone else wants to chime in---please do!

So how many LinkedIn connections do you have? I had no clue so I just checked and I have 45 and really didn't think much of it but I read that "people with more than twenty connections are 34 times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than 5?" But I would agree that there's definitely a caveat in that "quality trumps quantity."

But now i'm curious--has anyone used LinkedIn to actually make the right connections that eventually led to a job? If so, I am very interested to know your experience so shoot me a post!Although I'm sold on the potential opportunies that LinkedIn can provide, I still wonder if the statistic above really holds true.

Is there a Review-aholics Anonymous?

I'm not particularly proud of the fact that I'm addicted to Review websites...but it's shamefully true. Something that's supposed to help me make a decision quickly, ends up instead taking me hours and hours on end. I ironically encountered this situation this weekend and last week (ok fine, it's not so ironic because it happens almost every weekend!). Trip Advisor has to be my all-time favorite and the site that I spend the most time on. I tend to travel any spare time I get and absolutely cannot commit to any hotel until I read about 10 million reviews on Trip Advisor, and compare each hotel and come to some aggregate conclusion. I have found the most useful information on this site and find it relatively easy to distinguish between "real" reviews and those that are more of an isolated bad incident.

However, when it comes to restaurants, I don't particularly have a favorite review site and seem to find inconsistent consumer-led reviews. Instead, I tend to rely on sites displaying reviews from professional critics. But those sites seem to be slimming down quite a bit (e.g. Zagat) and all you can find now is amateur reviewers sharing their experiences and opinions. Which do you think is better? In the past I would have said professional critics but now it's a different story.

It so happened that this weekend I had a friend visiting from out of town and we wanted to try out a few new restaurants so I found myself constantly being directed in my Google searches to Yelp. I read at least two dozen, if not more reviews of various restaurants but found only a few reviews useful and had to sift through a lot more junk reviews. Interestingly enough, I read today that Yelp has a group of reviewers entitled the “Yelp Elite Squad,” who they consider their best reviewers. So I went back and looked at the reviews in my history and surely enough, the reviews I deemed most real were written by the Elite Squad. It was disturbing however that a NY Times article revealed that some reviews on Yelp seem to mysteriously disappear and it doesn't seem to be clear whether this discrepancy is due to spam filters or that Yelp is catering more toward their paid advertiser's (the very entities being reviewed) needs. Hmmm...it does feel a bit unsettling when you feel that there may be a bias to what reviews are posted, especially for someone like me who spends waaaaaaay too much time reading reviews before making a final decision.

Internet terminology is hard to keep up with!

I thought I was pretty Internet-savvy, but I'm beginning to realize that there's a whole different language out there that I have absolutely no knowledge of. Have you ever heard of "crowdsourcing"? If not, do a google search and you'll be up to speed in no time. As a matter of fact, look it up on wikipedia, which itself is a form of crowdsourcing!

Unfortunately, I'm still in the dark ages, but apparentely this word has been out there since 2006 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJD5RrEwrG0&feature=related). However, this concept has been around for ages in various forms, including its name derivation--outsourcing. Yup, crowdsourcing is basically a form of virtual outsourcing and then some. It's also been referred to as
“artificial artificial intelligence” but crowdsourcing is a much catchier phrase so Jeff Howe’s gets a lot more face-time (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s-l1XxZdHY)!

When I first learned of this term (yes, just a few days ago) I thought--wow, what a novel concept! But come to think of it...I've been engaging in crowdsourcing without even knowing it! At work, we're redoing our website and have been trying for months to come up with a catch phrase with our web-designers. We were throwing out ideas but getting no where--so then I had the "bright idea" of sending out an email to the general office and having a contest for the best response. We got a whole slue of creative responses and it only took a week! We also had the added bonus of having everyone participate and feeling included.

So you can just imagine the time and cost-saving results this concept provides to various business that solicit feedback from the entire internet community! Crowdsourcing also seems to provide a sense of community and contribution to areas that you wouldn't have been able to be a part of before. However, don't you think the pride and satisfication of individual ownership seems to suffer? Is this is a good thing or bad thing? I guess it can go both ways. But I can't help but feel bad for some of those folks who now are being replaced but crowdsourcing (i.e. photographers vs. IStockphoto - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html). But that's just a reality all of us have to face since everything seems replaceable these days by new-found cheaper and/or efficient options, whether it's outsourcing, crowdsourcing, or the next new thing. That's the price we pay for technology!

So now that I learned this new concept...i'm interested in unleashing my creative juices and can definitely use an extra bit of cash (albeit nominal) in this recession. Has anyone actually tried one of the various crowdsourcing opportunities? If so--let me know your thoughts!!

"potential privacy nightmare" is an understatement

As a Facebook junky, I initially was drawn to the Clive Thompson article by the title and assumed the article would be more about Facebook. Much to my surprise, I learned of yet another social networking method--reality mining. Although reality mining has the potential to gather useful predictive data (e.g. spread of diseases), for some reason George Orwell's character "Big Brother" comes to mind!

I do like the idea of social network analysis and see the potential benefits. However, don't you think that collecting data from email or phone logs is a bit too intrusive? Do you really want someone tracking your every move and every conversation? What if this information got into the wrong hands? Although some of the data may aid in workforce efficiency--can this same data be used against you to perhaps get you fired? I wouldn't be as opposed to aggregate data use vs. individually identifiable information. With the prevalence of social network analysis, I wonder how long before new privacy laws and data protection laws start popping up.

I will agree that the concept is quite exciting. It reminds me of Facebook in that it's really exciting in the beginning--reconnecting with various people and exploring a fun, new medium to be in contact with your social network. But then after the novelty wore off, I did feel a bit exposed and found myself creating "limited profile" views for many in my social circle. I wonder if we can have such discretion when it comes to reality mining.

I browsed the web to gather more information, but I still wasn't clear on whether information obtained through reality mining can be used without an individual's permission or if there is an option to opt out...anyone know? Securely utilizing this information for the betterment of mankind is one thing, but opening up the doors to more abuse of personal information is another.

Business week came out with an article last march entitled There's Gold in 'Reality Mining'
(http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2008/tc20080323_387127.htm) so apparently the business gurus are on board....I probably should try to get on the bandwagon because it looks like reality mining is here to stay. But for now, I'm still on the fence...

First Time Blogging

Hi Everyone--this is my first blog ever! I am excited to explore the world of blogging! I'm a MBA student at American University in DC and this blog is for my ITEC 656 class. Don't have much else to write at this point. I'm required to include the academic integrity pledge so here it goes--“On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own.” Blog to you soon...