Thoughts about Blogging Future

I find it really hard to write about something new since we covered great deal about social networking and blog and cooperative tools. In this post I would like to talk about things that I’m thinking of doing.

First of all, I’m thinking of changing my major from computer science to IT since I really find it very important for businesses and I’m sure what I learn in this class would help me a lot ( please if you have thought or comments about this feel free to respond). I’m also thinking about continuing writing and commenting in blogs. I really feel it is something very important to fallowing especially if I’m going to specialized in IT. I’m also thinking of having a blog about my country. In this blog about Saudi Arabia, I would like to talk mainly about two things cultures and businesses there. I’m also sure that I’ll have great use of blogging in my other classes.

I also would like to keep reading and commenting other people’s blogs. I think if I keep reading blogs I would improve my writing and my knowledge. I think it is also good way to make people visit my blog.

I’m sure I need some help. So I’ll ask my friends here and also my friends from back home to participate in my blog. This would help establishing blogs in Arabic since I do not know any that my friends are participating in so far. It also will make great diversity since ( hopefully ) I’ll have people commenting from deferent backgrounds and I’m sure that would really help me when I work and need to blog for my job.

I wish you guys have great summer and I also wish that we remain faithful to our blogs. Hopefully we visit each others blogs and participate in it.

Who's faster

When I read this article by Thomas Claburn about Web 2.0 Arrives to Find Web 3.0 Under Way I immediately thought about two things. First what’s web 3.0 and unfortunately nobody knows exactly what it is and the another point came to my mind when I read about a government agency that its system “required 22 terabytes of random access memory to handle the complex data processing and it was still unstable. When it crashed, he said, it took a week to boot up.” , is who is doing better job people trying to work in hardware or people working in software and also to which level they affect each other.

I find it really interesting when the prices of memory RAM and the Hard drives went down after being ridiculously expensive. Was that because the new software do not need that much memory as it used to be or it is just that the cost of producing decreased.

As I’m thinking of changing my major from Computer Science to IT another thing jumped to my mind is it better to study and work in software development or hardware development or know some of both. Is it enough to know how to use the technology or I must know how it was made.

If you have answers to my questions please help me out here 

Hmmm have fun or get hires ?!

I read the article ">Facebook, Jobster to Launch A Site for Young Job Seekers about Facebook and Jobster planning to cooperate togather to help in job search. I'm realy not sure about it. I think this would really change the idea of having fun in the facebook. I also remmeber one of the guys in the class mentiond that he couldn't get a job because of his facebook account. So I'm realy not sure how this would work. I think this would take Facebook to another level. It think it will be boring and people will think many times before posting anything. as mentiond in the article "While social-networking sites are making it easier for job seekers to connect with recruiters online, prospective hires must be more cautious of what they post on the Internet. The sites could also expose embarrassing photos and comments to potential employers or recruiters. Users will have to be more careful what information they post, or "tag," in the profiles they create through the Facebook career site than they would for a social-networking profile."

On the other hand, I really think it is great idea and it might really help businesses and users to get benefit of this cooperation. It will safe time but will it provides the right image about the condidate.

Why they do not send a message to all Facebook users to encourage users to open an account with Jobster instead of getting into the facebook profile. This would leave facebook fun as it is and will do the things for Jobster .

Wait Don't Buy New Phone

In Your First Day at Work DO NOT BLOG

I think what happened to Mark Jen is really sad and I feel bad for him. I think he made a mistake when he bloged about his company and I fully agree with Robert Scoble that Mark should wait until he become trusted by the company before starting blogging about it. Myself, I wont like it if a new employee say bad things about the company or criticizes its policies or managers. I think such employee who does not give him self time to really understand what is really going on in the company should be terminated since he would cause a lot of problems for the company by giving quick judgments and writing about them.

I think Mark should have talked to his boss and colleagues about these issues and he might get some answers which might change hid view of the company. He also mentioned that he wrote some comments about future products and I assume he wrote something against them which would might cause drop in sale for these products. I think if he went to his boss and told me about what he thought about these product or he wrote a report and file it to the involved department would be much better cause if his points are write they would conceder them and make changes otherwise they might explain their point of view and he probably would get credit for that.

I liked Mark standing what he believes in but we have to be careful and smart Robert said. In his blog Mark also mentioned that blog is a powerful tool and I agree with him but it can be for you and also it can be against you as we have seen more than a person were fired because of blogging.

Good or Bad

As I read in Teamwork, Supercharged, I rememberd something similer hapend while I was working and also I get to think it is really hard to adapt new technology in a company and I think it is harder to get employees to use this technology. The decision is hard to take by the owner or the manager of a company. They might think that if things are working probably in the traditional way why we spend money and take a risk in new things. A smart manager who can really make such decisions and save a lot of time and money.

The other abstract of adapting new technology is to get the employees to use it. You do not want to spend a lot of money and waste your time looking for technologies that help getting the job done but no one in your office are using it. I remember at my previous job we have some programs that we paid a lot of money for but unfortunately non of the workers used them. I discovered this by a chance while I was going through the company’s programs licenses. I went to the general manager and I discussed this issue and he said that they bought this programs long time ago and these are really very helpful tools and he was surprised that nobody was using them. We forced the employees to use some of the programs which they really like and get used to and we had to get rid of some other programs that the employees would never learn to use them easily. It would cost the company a lot money and time to train the employees to use these programs that is why we decided to exchange them for other programs.

So it was good decision from the general manager to buy some of the programs and in the other hand was bad decision to buy the other programs that we could not use in the company. I also think if he did not make the decision of buying these new software by himself the employees would never ask for such programs since they think it is easier for them to keep working in the old programs so they wont spend a lot of time learning how to use them.

Is he spying!

In The Hidden Power of Social Networks, the author asks a very important question " Does trust really matter?". I think it does. In the example that he gave about the health club. They found that the level of trust is high with the workers working together while the level little bit lower with the workers within the same departments that they work in deferent shifts and they never meet before. The study also shows that the trust level between people from other departments in very low. they gave an example of one worker that he feels embarrassed to go to ask " the others" and he also worry that his boss would know about that which might make her angry at him.

I think trust is very big issue. When I was working back home I noticed so many problems because of the lack of trust between employees. I found that people from the same nationality trust each other but they do not trust the other workers. I found that each workers from the same nationality form special hidden network where they discuss working matters and how to be sure that they don't get tricked by " the others". I was kind of lucky to get in these network and I had the chance to how they think. I found them always accusing each other of carelessness, laziness, causing problems with them, and mostly spying in them and giving their boss false information about them . This was big issue for me and for the company.

I noticed there was delay in the work because they were not cooperating with each other probably. A lot of time they came to me complaining about other workers. I found it odd that it had never happened that a guy from the same nationality complained about another guy from his country. It is always the other nationalities. I think if a problem between two guys from the same nationality occur they would solve between themselves as they trust each other. So it had never come to me.

Ignoring some of the complains was really great solution. One other good thing that we did that we forced them to work with each other as we intended to give a project to one group with multi nationalities workers. But the best thing that we did arranging the offices so we do not have more that two people from the same nationality in the same area. So they had to talk to the other people and then know them better by talking to them.