networking
Monday, October 27, 2008
So have any of you heard of LinkedIn? It is a web site that helps you keep in touch with your business contacts, old school mates, and so on.
So the other day an old contact there "invited" me to join on a new site called e-cademy. It seems that these are the days of "e", in a prefix sense. We have e-mail, e-commerce, e-cademy, e-bay, and who knows what all. It got so bad, the other day I just about had an e-piphany.
So apparently on e-cademy I am everybody's best friend. I cannot even tally how many emails (sorry, e-mails) I have received since I joined, from the president, the founder, his family, the founder, his family, their best hiking buddies, aggressive seminar folks that want to sell me something. There must be five messages a day, and I haven't really started.
Then an old friend invited me to join Facebook, apparently sharing the joy from an online acquaintence met in a different electronic neighborhood. Then, other old friends and cousins and relatives discover you are there and ping you and connect you with others that you know but only in person, not electronically. Now, you get to enter a note about what you are doing right now and join "fan" groups dedicated to real or e-vents. You get tempted to enter a sentence hourly to let your small but growing e-family know what you are doing Just This Minute: "Now I am on page 34. This is kind of boring".
So you get more involved and the amount of time that you spend there and other related sites increases. Or is it time that these sites are spending on you? And at some point you are inclined to say "Alright—that is just about too much" and wish for someone to just disconnect the internet so you could get something real (non-"e-") going instead of just every ten minut2234p@$* NO CARRIER