Strategic Privacy

It seems building effective social network in the virtual community requires you to have more personal and stronger connection with people. It is especially true in the strategic online communities such as LinkedIn which is the online social networking site with shared objective of recruitment. It is because that in such sites, people can reveal, and manipulate any formal information about oneself ,what one can really trust is their informal source of information such as their off-line community and their referential connections.

Also, the strength and trust of the connection need to be maintained within the community. Since, it is so easy to be connected with anyone these days, only question is how strong you can be connected. One interesting example is LiveJournalwhich integrated community blog with personal blog. In this network, readers have access to both their community blog as well as personal blogs which to have reader’s heart little closer to the blogger. As I mentioned in previous postings, it is amazing how one personal blog can build friendlier relation with readers. Therefore, maybe it is more important to use your privacy strategically than to protect one against others.

Infinite Freedom

Everybody is free from social distinction, physical location and identity on the web. People can express their opinions freely with infinite web capacity. However, it comes with the cost; information overload. If you try to search anything on Google, you would get millions of hits and you probably go through the only first couple of pages. Sure, Internet gives everyone freedom equally, but first website to come up on Google has much more influential power than the other ones. It would influence people more and shape the majority. Debra D’Agostino on his article, How the Web Polarized Politics, talks how the information tsunami causes polarization of ideas which are created by major players of the politics. I think, people are becoming more dependent on the information because we think Web is equal and free. However, each player on the web certainly has unequal influential power. Our commons, web, does not have regulation or control and that is great! However, we need to be aware that the infinite freedom of ours may not be the most equal or reliable thing.

Stalking Without Being Called a Stalker

Last week, "master of oracle", Tom Kyte, came to our class as a guest speaker.
Since I was looking at his blogs the day before, when I saw him, I could picutre his daughter and oracle building pictures he put up on his blogs.

Blog is so intersting and definately friendly. When he commented how his blog makes his sales business easier, I could totally see why!
There are couple of blogs and websites that I check frequently and some of them are quite personal.

I check my friend's blog who lives in Canada and I feel like I see her every single day...
I also check Japanese retail store's website because the comments from customers and responses are so funny, and of course I have some personal attachment to the random retail store.
Also, I check the blog of this random guy because he is funny and I even know how his x-girlfriend could talk with the ghosts and on the first day of the date, she bought toilet papers. I seriously feel like I am a stalker or something...

I think blog is the great way to shorten the distance between users and bloogers if, only if, your blog is interesting enough.
Although I never make comments on any of the blogs nor have any interaction, I know thier personal or business life for more than a year.
I think you as long as you are careful enough to what to say on the web, it is the great and fun way to approach large number of people but just know there are invisible stalkers though...