Welcome New Students!!! - Tech Tip #1
Hello and welcome to all new and old GSBM Pepperdine Students!
I hope you are as excited as I am to get started this year. Of course I will be in Spain until December and thus participating from afar, but hopefully through the blog and our club events I can stay connected and we can all be more involved.
In this post I hope to give you a overview of what future posts will look like, and then I will go to my tech tip of the week, which will likely surprise many of you as not something you would expect to see in a technology blog.
But first to give an overview of what is going on here: This blog is for Pepperdine students who have either joined the Tech M (Pepperdine Technology Management Club), or for those who just want a weekly fun tip/site to look at to stay abreast of current tech events. I simply intend to pick out a fun site that I have seen throughout the week that I think would be valuable for more people to be aware of.
From there I will give some background information, and then a little task to complete that would require you use the site. The whole process is intended to be interesting, entertaining, and hopefully a little educational (but not too much), so a key component will be your interaction in the process.
Let me know if you see a cool site that I should post for the week, and make comments about your experiences with the sites. Any thoughts you have about how this could be applicable and beneficial in the business world would be appropriate and appreciated.
So without any further waiting, lets start up our first Tech Tip of the Week!
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Tech Tip #1
What is it?:
As I said, this weeks site is one that just about all of you should have heard of, and many of you are already using. It is the monster of social networking, and gets more page views a day than Yahoo. That's right, I am talking about MySpace! (www.MySpace.com) (Wikipedia on MySpace)
There are basically three types of people out there when it comes to MySpace. There are people who know and use MySpace every day, people who are fighting with all their might to stay away from it, and those who are totally cut off from the world. I am assuming you fall into one of the first two categories(I'm category #2), but for those in the third let me welcome you back from Timbuktu with a brief overview of the site.
MySpace is a social networking site that enables you to easily create a personal page, connect with friends through messaging, post pictures, play & share music, and much more.
Here are some current statistics about MySpace (taken from here):
So What?:
So everybody is doing it, who cares? This is the perfect question to ask when thinking about MySpace. Did I put it here for you to see just because it is popular?
Well the main reason I am putting the site here is to announce that PepperTechM, our favorite technology industry group at GSBM, has now started its own account on MySpace. I didn't set it up because it was trendy, I am doing it because it is an easy way for me to manage everything while I am in Spain. When thinking about my options for how I can keep the club alive while I am gone, I turned down the idea of a website because it would be too much work to maintain. As anyone in web design or a business that has had a website will know, unless you keep current content then a site dies, and fast. So if the focus was on the content, and my goal was to bring together a group of students to a place where they could view a calendar of upcoming events, as well as provide an easy way for me to broadcast messages and coordinate meetings, I knew that MySpace was the easy way to do it.
So that is why I did it, how does that help you? Well what it is, is a way that someone used a free technology that was initially made for a slightly different purpose and modified it for our use. Additionally, I am putting our group out where others can easily access it. These are concepts that you can use in your business. A business needs to find ways to accomplish the most with a minimum of cost and effort. And the more publicity you can get the better.
So that is it. Check out MySpace and get informed, because if you don't use this stuff, you sure know your kids will one day, and it is better to know what is going on in advance.
What Next?:
Your PepperTech M Task for the Week is to go to MySpace, make an account if you haven't already, and add PepperTechM as one of your friends. For those of you fighting to stay away from MySpace don't worry, I won't make you log on twenty times a day the way most users already do. Just add the group so that we can all stay connected. Once you do this, I will add you to the distribution list for this club so that you can stay up on current events.
After that, check out the site and tell me what you think. Do you like it? Hate it? Do you see any other potential business applications?
Besides that, welcome to Pepperdine (or welcome back). I look forward to any responses you post!
(go to www.MySpace.com/PepperTechM to see our clubs page)
For those of you who consider MySpace to be a bit behind the normal definition of current events, you are correct. In the future we will try to be a bit more farsighted about the coming trends, but for now this seemed like a good way to get the group started.
I hope you are as excited as I am to get started this year. Of course I will be in Spain until December and thus participating from afar, but hopefully through the blog and our club events I can stay connected and we can all be more involved.
In this post I hope to give you a overview of what future posts will look like, and then I will go to my tech tip of the week, which will likely surprise many of you as not something you would expect to see in a technology blog.
But first to give an overview of what is going on here: This blog is for Pepperdine students who have either joined the Tech M (Pepperdine Technology Management Club), or for those who just want a weekly fun tip/site to look at to stay abreast of current tech events. I simply intend to pick out a fun site that I have seen throughout the week that I think would be valuable for more people to be aware of.
From there I will give some background information, and then a little task to complete that would require you use the site. The whole process is intended to be interesting, entertaining, and hopefully a little educational (but not too much), so a key component will be your interaction in the process.
Let me know if you see a cool site that I should post for the week, and make comments about your experiences with the sites. Any thoughts you have about how this could be applicable and beneficial in the business world would be appropriate and appreciated.
So without any further waiting, lets start up our first Tech Tip of the Week!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tech Tip #1
What is it?:
As I said, this weeks site is one that just about all of you should have heard of, and many of you are already using. It is the monster of social networking, and gets more page views a day than Yahoo. That's right, I am talking about MySpace! (www.MySpace.com) (Wikipedia on MySpace)
There are basically three types of people out there when it comes to MySpace. There are people who know and use MySpace every day, people who are fighting with all their might to stay away from it, and those who are totally cut off from the world. I am assuming you fall into one of the first two categories(I'm category #2), but for those in the third let me welcome you back from Timbuktu with a brief overview of the site.
MySpace is a social networking site that enables you to easily create a personal page, connect with friends through messaging, post pictures, play & share music, and much more.
Here are some current statistics about MySpace (taken from here):
- It has 61 + million registered users with 21+ million unique visitors (media metrix)
- It's the second largest destination on the web, by page views
- It splits 50.2% male, 49.8% female
- They reach more men online than ESPN.com. They reach more females online than iVillage.
- The primary age demo is 16-34
- They have 1.4 million registered bands, 350,000 band blogs
- The site attracts 220,000 new registrants daily
- There are 50,000 groups including fashion, health, wellness & fitness, sports and recreation, music, film, TV, etc.
So What?:
So everybody is doing it, who cares? This is the perfect question to ask when thinking about MySpace. Did I put it here for you to see just because it is popular?
Well the main reason I am putting the site here is to announce that PepperTechM, our favorite technology industry group at GSBM, has now started its own account on MySpace. I didn't set it up because it was trendy, I am doing it because it is an easy way for me to manage everything while I am in Spain. When thinking about my options for how I can keep the club alive while I am gone, I turned down the idea of a website because it would be too much work to maintain. As anyone in web design or a business that has had a website will know, unless you keep current content then a site dies, and fast. So if the focus was on the content, and my goal was to bring together a group of students to a place where they could view a calendar of upcoming events, as well as provide an easy way for me to broadcast messages and coordinate meetings, I knew that MySpace was the easy way to do it.
So that is why I did it, how does that help you? Well what it is, is a way that someone used a free technology that was initially made for a slightly different purpose and modified it for our use. Additionally, I am putting our group out where others can easily access it. These are concepts that you can use in your business. A business needs to find ways to accomplish the most with a minimum of cost and effort. And the more publicity you can get the better.
So that is it. Check out MySpace and get informed, because if you don't use this stuff, you sure know your kids will one day, and it is better to know what is going on in advance.
What Next?:
Your PepperTech M Task for the Week is to go to MySpace, make an account if you haven't already, and add PepperTechM as one of your friends. For those of you fighting to stay away from MySpace don't worry, I won't make you log on twenty times a day the way most users already do. Just add the group so that we can all stay connected. Once you do this, I will add you to the distribution list for this club so that you can stay up on current events.
After that, check out the site and tell me what you think. Do you like it? Hate it? Do you see any other potential business applications?
Besides that, welcome to Pepperdine (or welcome back). I look forward to any responses you post!
(go to www.MySpace.com/PepperTechM to see our clubs page)
For those of you who consider MySpace to be a bit behind the normal definition of current events, you are correct. In the future we will try to be a bit more farsighted about the coming trends, but for now this seemed like a good way to get the group started.
