Last class

August 17, 2002 was my first day in the USA, I Came from Jeddah city in my country Saudi Arabia in order to work as a training officer. Since I got on the plan I was thinking how is going to be my life how can I live alone specially that I came from a society that cares about family connection rather than anything else. However, I arrived in Dulles airport; I was impressed to green everywhere, nice highway, and heavy trafficJ.

Since then I started studying and every day I learn something new, until I took my ITEC300 class “social net working”, I knew that I didn’t learn anything. I was not expecting the kind of huge technology that we have reached such as internet, blogs, messenger, chatting, second life tech, and virtual team. I’m really amazed from what I learned in this class, I realized that the existence of new technology made our life smaller, as if we live in a one place not a huge world anymore.

People live in Saudi Arabia can chat, talk, and see others in different continent while are sitting on the couch drinking their coffee, and won’t cost them more than cents believe it or not. Whereas couple years ago you only can do that by face to face conversation or watch them trough the TV and if you want to talk to someone that isn’t in your area will cost dollars if not hundreds.

No matter how old you are, from where you are, what race or sex you are. All are human talk in one language; if these rules apply, you can get the advantages of this huge revelation. In marketing, business in general, forms friendship, volunteer organization. Moreover, it could help to change courtiers’ diplomacy not only small organization or institution.

Finally, I wish for all my classmate and Prof. Melander best wishes in their life

Globalization

It's really something nice to see how someone could help and contribute to the betterment of society or to the "social good" without even moving from your chair or place!. the world is getting more and more connected and people from all over the world who have the same interest are getting closer to each other.

for a middle generation person like me, remembering perhaps couple of yours ago,before the invention of the Internet or advanced technology like cell phones or pagers at least in my country. It was almost impossible to be connected with someone even from our family. after the introduction of the pager, people were very excited and amazed of this technology. they even sometimes paged each other just for fun to listen to the sound to this amazing device. At that time, it was very difficult to communicate and create as simple as local organization.

Then came the revolution of cell phones and Internet. by this, things became much easier. It made it even easier to create international organizations and communicate globally with different people and cultures. People became more aware of each other differences in terms of customs and culture and this in turn made communication more effective between different countries. for example, I don't have to travel to China to know their culture or even from Saudi Arabia to Italy. the "social networking" environment is helping in resolving cultural, diplomatic,political and religious conflicts between people as we interact more and more with each other to serve for the betterment for our society.

In my humble opinion, the social networking will help, in the near future, in producing a mixture of globally interacted custom and cultures.

Overlap

The Term “user generated content” is so unattractive to me. I don’t know why but I think using the term social networking lead s to the same meaning. I believe that any website that offers that opportunity for consumers to share their knowledge and familiarity with a product or experience could just be called “social networking.” I think using to many terms is misleading sometimes.
The “UCG”, or what I would like to call social networking, allows all users the choice of becoming participants rather than just viewers or audience. It also provides knowledge experts for audience as well not only participants.
However, the “UCG” might cause some issues of incredibility and biased information that might be sometimes useless for participants. This could also lead to content overlap or duplicity.

It's time to like politics.......

Day after day in this semester I discover that social networking penetrates in every domain. the articles and book topic of this week explained a new advantage that we can gain from the use of social network, which is the the political aspect.

mentioned in the book, the advantage of blogging and it's effect on the campaign of Howard Dean, one can really notice the reality of the use of social networking not only in marketing and socializing but also in politics........ as I mentioned in two of previous blogs"how to be a millioner" & " Bloglization" that there is no limit to the use of blogging.

a good example that needs to be mentioned here is in the article about the the two teens. I wasn't surprised about the use of facebook or myspace; however, the idea itself of raising money through social networking by the two teenagers grabbed my attention. It's really nice to see how younger generations are taking the advantages in a real positive way rather than abusing or misusing the technology.

looking for a job?.....

The articles I read reminded me of a conversation that we had in class related to recruiting and hiring by referral networking. It was a very debatable topic, some agreed and some disagreed of the advantages of the referral networking process. I was one of those who were pro referral networking. my rational behind this, was that even if you get hired or get a job through referral, your job isn't going to last if you are not being really committed coz people are paying you money to be in their organization and if you are not good enough certainly they are going to look for another person to do the job.

The same rational also applies for using the blog as resume or using social networking for recruitment. Surely, It's a very easy and inexpensive way to get connected and find the right person for any specific job.However, if that person doesn't prove to be "the One"...... well good luck for him or her in finding another job.

I think that the best advantage of any business form of social networking is to be connected with others in the same business and share knowledge and expertise.

It's small world after all..

Every week I learn something new with the ITEC class. Sometimes I read about stuff that I haven't heard about. This week's articles content is certainly a new info for me. And I'm thinking seriously to join one of the professional websites. I really like the Idea. Some way or another we have to admit that the advantages of the technology. I can't even keep up with the latest techniques. I feel overwhelmed by the new technology. It feels like I'm having an "info.rush hour" in my head!!.

These website would definitely help companies especially for the Human resource functions in terms of recruiting, hiring and connecting to other people to share experience. This kind of technology makes life easier for professional people to stay connected with others in the same interest of business. If I were an HR manager, I would definitely be connected with any of these professional websites as a type of informal networking.

"15 uses of prof......." lists interesting points for the uses of professional websites. I liked the idea of number 5 & 13. I've never thought that it would be this easy to socially network in a professional manner.

Time is Money

When time is gone. It's gone!. whatever you do you will never can get it back. It's really important to manage time especially in this century of "technology era". everything requires to be done fast, efficient and in an easy way. So definitely the idea of collaborative virtual teamwork by using the available technology from Internet to satellite radars is fitting the context of the fast growing globalized environment. As the population growth is increasing rapidly, our responsibilities from being an individual or an organization is growing as well to cope with the changes fast and efficient.

Just a simple imagination of how our lives would be without the Internet drives me crazy! I still can't imagine how we used to manage our hectic life responsibilities without using e-mails, for example, to confirm meetings or send documents in just seconds!.

having a collaborative teams by using the Web services from Basecamp to Wiki saves time, money and energy. It can be widely applied to different sectors from public to private.

However, maybe because I'm from an older generation, I still see face to face meetings exist on a wide bases from the political to the business environment . I really think that the technology is Superior but it's weakest point is in delivering emotions compared to face to face meetings.