Wrap-up of week 1

Materials read:

Do you trust this face by GQ
Video conversation with Reid Hoffman
Does the Internet make you smarter/dumber?

     I had no technical issues in consuming any of the media and found the amount that was suggested to complete a bit overwhelming as just looking at the hours from the videos alone would take up an entire weekend day. Luckily though, I felt that I did enough reading and video watching, in addition to the podcasts, that I now feel pretty comfortable with the materials and a general introduction to things like twitter and blogs.

     I especially enjoyed the conversation with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman to see what that site will develop into in time. I think it is a useful site, and especially since I am planning a career change in the next couple of years, I am extremely interested to see how that site can serve my goal to network effectively.
  
     In fact, as the professors point out, as I have my eyes open to web marketing, I have noticed several things announced this week surrounding the materials that I have consumed. The first was an announcement email by LinkedIn that they are tailoring their job path tools on the site to make them more useful for people in different stages of networking. For me I see this as a better use of the vast networking opportunities present with the data that LinkedIn controls, to help somebody move up the ladder or into a new career, for example. These are exactly the types of products that Reid mentioned would be coming out and it is cool to see the manifestation of his comments.  The other thing that I noticed as relates to web marketing was an older issue of Bloomburg Businessweek that I had around the house talked about the massive effect Google's Adwords have on companies' availability to generate revenue from online search results. The interesting aspect was that with a simple and routine tweak of their software, they can literally gut a company's revenue stream from reliable web results where their top tier return is lowered dramatically. Even if Google didn't intend that result, it can devastate online commerce sites overnight and there is a power struggle with Google and its business customers to prevent those sorts of conscious or unconscious rewrites. In the macro aspect, it truly shows how powerful Google is in its control of the internet, raising some questions about monopolies and non-compete issues.

     That is about all the reflections I have this week, I will probably watch a couple more Charlie Rose videos since I find his interviews interesting and informative.