How to network in a conference

Image from punchstock.com

There are a lot of useful tips that we can gain from the web about networking in a conference. For example some useful tips from blogger Chris Bogan, is that if there is a blog of an event or a conference, it is wise to upload a picture of yourself and blog with other members to make a connection. During the conference you can try to identify the people you blogged with and it could be an ice-breaker.

An aspect that I found noteworthy is the degree of information you give when you introduce yourself. Giving too much information, can bombard a person and seem too serious. For example giving your full name and the company you work for, can be too much information as a conversation starter. Alternatively, it can be a good conversation starter if somebody is interested in the company you work for.

People also develop an impression about the company you work for, from the impression they get from you as a person. Therefore impressions count and you could be a good spokesperson for the company or could give a bad reputation to the company, if you don’t give a good impression. I felt this personally, when I attended a career fair and conference, where a female recruiter from Ernst and Young was giving interviewing advise. She sounded very critical of interviewees, yet she dressed shabbily, her hair was messy and she wore no makeup. It didn’t give me a good impression of Ernst & Young, and made it seem like it was a stern place to work and employed strange people. I didn’t mind that she had high expectations from applicants about etiquette and dress, yet she sounded hypocritical when she didn’t seem very put together.

Another area of social networking that we should all take note of is card-giving: that it is more useful to receive than to give. This selfish mentality has a purpose from a seller’s perspective, as you can contact potential customers to offer products for example. However, in trade fairs, booths are very inclined to give out brochures and name cards as a form of promotion and advertising. In the end of the day, from experience, you can realize which strategy works best for you and which approach to take based on the situation.

Moving from paper based systems to online documenting

Increasingly, we are moving from paper based systems of documenting things such as papers, reports, and creative works to digital and online forms of storing such data. For example, we are moving from printing out physical photographs from our cameras to having most of our pictures saved on our computers and shared online. It is definitely becoming cheaper as well, to store information online and it conserves space.

I remember my Dad having stacks of photo albums and videotapes of family videos and events. Much of the pictures I take today are stored in my laptop, yet my parents are not so tech-saavy to view online social networking sites to view uploaded pictures. However, it is becoming more expensive to print pictures, and therefore it is a definite cost saver by storing them digitally.

Even when I create papers and personal works, most of them are stored digitally in my laptop or servers. This definitely saves space and provides another storage method that could reduce the risk of physically storing material such as losing it through a fire, theft or misplacement. When I was in my early years of high school, I wrote some English papers, that I found amusing when I read them after I graduated high school. Unfortunately, those papers got thrown out, when my family was spring cleaning. Therefore, in some ways, digital storage can be a back-up to physical storage of information. In addition, the images or information would not get physically damaged or destroyed such as old photographs.

Is Second Life going too far?

In this online community, it mimics real economic-based society where you can buy clothes to keep up with trends and amass wealth to enjoy a better standard of living.

There is growing commerce and people work just as hard in their Second Life (SL) jobs as in their real jobs, in order to generate income and have the lifestyle they want to lead. But are people taking Second Life a bit too seriously? I haven’t tried out the online community myself, but from what I’ve been reading, it sounds kind of addictive and I don’t want to be devoting time and money to something, which I should be doing for my real life.

Even land buying and selling can be carried out by speculators in Second Life. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick , a Russian translator in New York city owns several properties in Second Life, and charges between $1.50 and $150 in rent. Ironically she takes profits made in a virtual reality life to pay for real-world bills.

Second Life sounds interesting and fun and is a microcosm of society as we know it. In some ways, it could let us live our fantasies and do things that we couldn’t do in daily life such as the characters people choose in SL and the unusual trends and fashion they follow such as butterfly wings. It just scares me how people take things quire seriously and indicates there is a big potential for virtual reality.

Has the Internet made us stupid?

I don’t think so! Some argue that the Internet has made people more antisocial and more connected with an electronic box which they devote a significant amount of time to. With the aid of the Internet and the useful applications that go a long with it such as email, teleconferencing, and information gathering for example, some may argue that we are becoming more anti-social.

I disagree with the 90 plus year old Nobel Laureate, Dorris Lessing, that the Internet phenomenon has been a step back for society. It just changes the way we do things. Hard-working people tend to spend hours gathering information or doing their job by reading books or other written material and processing and transferring information to hard copy documents. With the aid of the computer, however, many of these activities can be done in one terminal, processed, stored and disseminated. It makes us more efficient as many things can be done through a single medium. Such activities tend be anti-social anyway, regardless of whether your using a computer or not.

There are several disadvantages for being so connected, as the syndrome of always wanting to check your email, can cause people to be more paranoid and restless. It becomes difficult to take a vacation without having Internet access. Sometimes you have to discipline yourself, and restrict accessing the Internet to a certain time and for a certain period. Checking your email multiple times a day, while on holiday can be excessive, but it tends to be a habit.

I believe the Internet has made our lives easier, and made us smarter by being able to access more knowledge. People who are resistant to change tend to favor things being done the old way. However, if they use the system they can slowly learn the benefits of it and appreciate different ways of doing things. This is one thing that I learned from living in different countries and having to adapt to different ways of doing things and the logic behind it.

Carolyn's Blog

Carolyn's Blog discusses Windows Vista and all its disadvantages. Also you have to check out the picture of the dog she put on her postings -its quite cute!

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Who knew that the human mind is still superior to the computer.

One would believe that in today’s world, computer intelligence would be very advanced and almost anything can be accurately carried out by computers. However, some actions that human’s find easy such as identifying images, are very difficult for a computer to recognize.

The computers are only as smart as the people who build them. It has greatly improved our lives, and we can shop online, check our bank statements, perform complicated calculations, and it has made it easier and cheaper to communicate with people from around the world.

However, there is still room for expansion, and as programmers and IT developers continue on their path to making more intelligent systems, we could get better functionality from the Internet.

In a way, there is some benefit to having computers being unable to recognize images or carry out certain tasks, as it can rule out Bots. Bots have become very common on the Internet and they can be a nuisance.

There are several websites that pay people to perform tasks, that a computer would find very difficult to do, such as “Mechanical Turk” and “ChaCha.com.” I was requested to carry out tasks on the Internet such as surveys. However it did not pay very well, and it offered coupons or free gifts where you would have to spend a certain amount and then you would receive a discount or a free item. I felt this was not a big incentive enough for me, and the amount of time it took and the reward I was getting did not match up.

Therefore, from that particular experience, I became skeptical about doing these online tasks to earn money. Perhaps sites such as Mechanical Turk or ChaCha could be more financially rewarding since they pay you in monetary terms instead of coupons or vouchers. One would have to weigh the opportunity cost of doing such tasks and the amount of time they have on their hands to consider performing those online tasks.