Well remember those days when you would say A for apple, B for bat and so on. Those days seem to have left far behind. Presenting the generation next – Google alphabets. The alphabets are based on the searches in the international edition of Google. Enjoy!
Well I thought it would still be A for apple. You know the one with i. Let’s see what more surprises are in store.
Bad luck for Bank of America.
Cricket isn’t even in the top ten list.
Another indication that the people are turning erudite. Disney manages to just get into the top ten.
Indeed, it deserves the position.
Oh, even a moron could’ve predicted that.
Again no surprise. It is followed by Google maps, Google earth and Google.com.
Still hot eh!
Now that’s a bit of surprise. No “Incredible” India, no ipod in the top ten list. Movies rock.
Again, that’s totally new for me. Seems like a low-fare airline. Yeah with recession hanging around, it shouldn’t be a surprise for many. But then, jobs should have topped the list.
It proves recession hasn’t hit the retail sector much.
Home improvement is a never ending task. Lowe’s on a roll.
Social networking is fun. No surprise here. Everyone needs a bit of space even if it’s virtual.
Movies are immortal.
The popularity hasn’t been hit even when offices are shut around the globe. Olympics gets the second spot and Oprah holds on to the tenth spot.
Avatar’s popularity must have helped this online radio major. The list also includes my favourite Pizza Hut. Paypal and Pirate Bay too find their name on the list. Notable miss: Playstation.
With every site providing options for status updates, quotes are more in demand. Well, a witty saying proves nothing.
What more can you expect when people are more keen in selling their homes. Rotten Tomatoes just manages to get into the top ten list.
Another low-cost airline. And this is even more popular. So popular that in 2009 it has transported more passengers than any other airline in the world. Skype gets the third position and the super glamour Super Bowl has to satisfy with the sixth position. Sony doesn’t finds a place in the top ten.
This has to be the mother of all heart breaks. Tiger Woods and Twitter falls short and comes second and third respectively. Now who’s gonna tweet that?
In the age of super fast communication systems, the company has managed to stay on. There are two of my favourites in the list – urban dictionary and utorrent.
If it is the largest telecommunications operator, it is quite natural to be on the top of this list. Victoria Secret is second. vlc is there and the notable exception is Virgin.
Need I say anything about it. Wikipedia comes third.
Microsoft got one more reason to cheer about. Notable misses: Xerox and xe.
Youtube dislodges Yahoo! from the popularity list. Yellow Pages manages to hold on to the fourth position.
Yet another real estate site finds the top position. Zune sneaks in. And surprise surprise, Zoe Saldana is at ninth. It’s always rewarding to work with James Cameron.
Building a relationship with your manager can be tough sometimes, but remember these simple rules and the relationship you have with your superiors will certainly have the potential to be successful.
We all want to succeed
We like people who help us succeed. You will build trust and credibility with your manager when you prove that your goal is to help them succeed. This doesn’t mean you are a “yes sir” person, always agreeing (more on this below), but rather that your focus is on their success, which is ultimately your organizations success. When they look good, you’ll look good and you’ll reach your departments objectives as well, developing a reputation of someone who delivers results.
Feed them the right information
I mentioned not being a “yes sir”. You role is to be a subject matter expert. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, only that in your role it’s your primary focus. As such, you have an obligation to ensure that your manager understands what’s important in detail. I’ve always worked with the understanding that I’ll make sure my manager has all the information, and I’ll fight for what I think is right. Until they make a decision, I’ll work hard to defend my position as the subject matter expert. But here’s the key; when your manager makes a decision, forget your opinion because it’s gone and over with. Never tell people down the road that you thought it was a bad choice, or were fighting for another choice. Remember, we’re going for trust and credibility, not undermining authority. Show your manager that you have the guts to fight for what you think is right, and the fortitude to stand at his side even though he went a different direction.
Market them and your company
Never tell people that you don’t like working for them, their stupid or you hate working for them. Remember, you’re trying to help them succeed, not run them into the ground. If you talk about them in a negative light, or even bad mouth the company you work for, it’s time to leave and find something new because you’ve torn down the foundation to your career success. Be an advocate for your organization, your boss and your situation. If you can’t, update your resume and find somewhere you can.
You don’t need to be close friends with your employer (although that can be nice), but you definitely need to be on the same page, working towards the same goal and objectives. If you’re fighting against them rather than with them, you will do damage to your reputation, be worthless to your company and be your own biggest roadblock to success.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Subscribe today, and connect with me on Twitter and let’s talk about your experiences.
Facebook and Twitter are challenging the very foundation of our internet experience. From the days of dial-up, the Internet has been the most prolific catalog of human experience in recorded history. Services like Google and Yahoo have made millions of dollars organizing all of that data for us to search, but social networks like Facebook and MySpace, coupled with the emergence of real-time information provided by Twitter have irreversibly altered the landscape of the Internet.
Many consider email the advent of the social web and modern email clients like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are more easily compared to social networks, but at its heart, email is just a messaging service. It might deliver messages in the blink of an eye instead of taking days or weeks, but in the end it’s just a digital form of mail. Chat rooms are another form of early social communication, but real identities were very rarely ever linked to this communication and nascent chat rooms more or less resembled the wild west of creepsters and registered sex offenders.
The true advent of widely accepted social interaction on the web are instant messenger services where you communicated with people you knew and who knew you in real-time chat windows. It was the beginning of real conversations on the web. Instant messaging served as proof of concept that people desired to use the internet as a social medium.
Direct instant messaging services like AIM were essentially the real-time expression of an email correspondence. You can think of Twitter in the same frame of real-time expression of an already established form of social media communication, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
MySpace and eventually Facebook upped the anty when they allowed users to create profiles that they could customize to reflect their individuality and connect to other profiles that reflected their real life group of friends and family. If instant messaging gave us a voice to communicate digitally, then social networks gave us a presence on the Internet that reflected our personality in the real world.
I’d also argue that MySpace’s fall from grace could be partly blamed to the nature of user-expression in their profiles. Many people immediately reference the customizable profile elements as a primary draw for creating a MySpace profile, but after a while the aesthetic of the MySpace community became very confused and to be frank, ugly. Not to discount the importance of individuality, but connections are usually formed because of commonalities and feelings of familiarity/trust. The aesthetic of MySpace, I believe, created a subliminal trust barrier because it emphasized our differences instead of what naturally draws us together. Facebook on the other hand has standard profiles that allow users to just control the information that they share. Even MySpace’s name emphasizes individuality over community. MySpace. Not YourSpace or OurSpace. MySpace.
Facebook’s introduction to the market and it’s origin as an elite-college social network gave it an incubation period that was healthy for the development of it’s culture. While most see students as crazy, reckless and impulsive (which they usually are), I’d argue they are the most aware of and in-tune with social influences that permeate their circles. Being a college student is tough. A completely new set of people in your life forces you to connect with a new set of friends and communities for you to express yourself. As young adults gain more independence to explore and own their self-expression, they also become very aware of how they are perceived and this gives them an incentive to actively control that perception. This isn’t just true of college students. Teens and even kids in grade school are highly aware of social status, what’s cool and what isn’t. This aspect of student culture transfered to the early iterations of Facebook as students on the network were highly aware that their profile could easily be the first impression they make on a number of people. When you don’t know whether your crush or your arch-enemy is reading up on your activities, interests and groups, you tend to self-censor a little more carefully. This leads to profiles that are a little tamer, but ultimately more inviting to connection with a wider net of people because there are fewer outlier/alienating elements included in profiles. The profiles also more closely reflect the real-life expression of our identity because most of us are very proficient at controlling our perceptions through self-censorship.
Fast forward to 2010 and social networks have begun to dominate discussion in the advertising world and among thought-leaders developing tomorrow’s business models. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is one of those thought-leaders. He sees Facebook and the social web overtaking search engines as the primary portal through which people interface with the web. I won’t argue with this point. I do believe as the social web will continue to develop and deepen digital relationships, that social networks will become our homepage and primary reason for going online, but I also believe that search engines and the information-web have a unique role independent of the social-web.
Those who argue that the internet experience is converging into one portal that people will use both socially and to seek information seem to ignore the fact that digital technology, in almost every instance, begins to mimic our real life experience. If our real life were 100% social and all of the information we learned was through our friends and family, then I’d jump right on the bandwagon for a one-portal interface solution to the internet. This is not the case though. We seek information from sources outside our social sphere and interact with the world in many ways that have nothing to do with our friends. Sure, we seek the opinion of our peers on subjects, but many people prefer to develop their own perspective before letting others influence their opinion. How is that possible if social networks and the influence of our peers is interwoven with all of our internet experience?
In the end, I don’t see the information-web and social-web experiences converging into a single solution for all your internet needs. Facebook and other social networking services like Twitter and Foursquare have a long way to go before they have maximized their online potential because they’re only starting to integrate themselves tangibly into our real life experiences. The power of digital word-of-mouth is only starting to be felt because consumers are still acclimating to the idea of expressing opinions online. The rise of blogging, Twitter, status updates and viral content online is helping drive this expression to the mainstream. As opinion expression spreads through the culture of the internet and more people become comfortable with sharing their thoughts online, businesses will be forced to listen and encourage this feedback because it will provide them invaluable data on their customers that they’ve never really had access to before. From a research perspective, think of social media as the largest representative sample in the history of research.
Personal expression is extremely important to the growth and integration of the Internet as a ubiquitous aspect of our everyday lives, but the web as a source of independent information and cataloging will always be a part of our user-experience. A converged Internet would be like living in a world without libraries or bookstores where you could only borrow buy books based on your friend’s interests and literary purchase history. There is no winner in this war between social and independent portal experiences because the “battle” is just a narrative that has been developed based on too narrow of a perspective. The user-experience will eventually converge in it’s ubiquity, but diverge in the expression of that ubiquity, ultimately reflecting the very complexity of those who created the experience.
So I found a collection of “what if websites were…” images. Most of them are 9gag.com. Be sure to share them and let me know which ones you like the most
If browser were people…
What if browser were women?
Our new Myspace design for Cypress Hill has just been launched! This was an incredibly fun project to work on, mainly because I had great assets to work with. I would like to give a special props/thanks to Mr. Frank Maddocks for kicking so much ass on the cover art for “Rise Up”, which is set to hit stores on…… Wait, I’ll give you ONE guess as to the release date… Thats right, international “Smoke a Lot of Weed Day”. SHOCKER! Circa Survive also has a new album coming out on that very same day that I am very excited to hear called “Blue Sky Noise”. (**shinfo)
Anyways, snag both of these great CD’s on April 20th, unless you, for some reason, happen to be too lazy on that particular day. You know what, fuck it, just buy em on Wednesday.
Til then, you can preview a few tracks on Cypress Hill’s BRAND SPANKIN NEW MYSPACE!
You hear enough women say that women these days – can do it all. I woke up this morning questioning the validity of these statements and the percentage of mothers who have deluded themselves in believing into such overused cliché.
When I was working full-time; I was always worrying about my kids and spent three-quarters of my day feeling very guilty about leaving them to other people. I always felt like I was missing out on seeing them, getting to know them and knowing them completely. It was like a burden I carried all day at work. I didn’t function well and probably got away with just using 2% of my brain if any. I’ve always put my job second and that was fine with me because I knew that if my kids grew up without a sense of direction – then I’ve messed up in a big way and at that point I know the damage would be irrevocable.
Growing up, my mother worked 18-hour days. I always thought she was insane! My father on the other hand; had a 9-5 job and tried very hard to keep order in our home. It was tough; but as my sister and I grew older; we learned to adapt and do things for ourselves. I probably spent a good amount of my teenage years convincing myself that I was fine, that our life was ok and that I didn’t miss out on anything special. My sister and I certainly didn’t have everything but we’ve managed to get decent grades at school; rarely got ourselves in trouble and stayed away from the wrong type of friends. All of that, without my parents pushing us to do better in school or giving us lectures about how to pick the right friends. They were pretty easy-going as far as parents goes. Majority of my friend’s parents also worked; not the kind of long hours my parents did but they dealt with the same things as I did. It was the norm for me and looking back; I have no regrets or anger towards my parents because they weren’t there for my volleyball games or award ceremonies. They did the best they could and if I couldn’t remember any instances when they were present for me – then so be it. I don’t love and respect them any less.
Now that I am a mother of four, I’ve been trying to examine my life a little closer. I’ve been out of the workforce for 1.5 years; mainly because of my health and secondly because I’ve lost my ability to jungle work and family without hyperventilating on the freeway. Not having an income is devastating for someone who has worked all her life. Some days, I feel like I have nothing. There are still house payments and car payments to make and often times I feel like I have nothing to contribute. Despite of all the things that I do; like housework, homework, yard work and any work related things you could think of that involves 4 kids and a home – it doesn’t hide the fact that I bring in zero dollars in this household. There are days when this realization is hard to take.
Life at home has its own share of joy. Yes, I am one of those weird mothers who enjoy cleaning and doing the same chores over and over. What can I say? I’m a glutton for punishment. It took probably a good year for me to get used to living a life without a schedule. Anything goes in this household! In spite of all the preconceived ideas of any working mother contemplating on being a stay-at-home mom; I will be the first to tell you that it’s been absolutely rewarding. The rewards that I have gotten at the end of the day pales in comparison to taking home a paycheck. I kid around about leaving my kids behind to my husband if we ever get a divorce but my kids had been an absolute joy to have around. When my husband is out-of-town; I try to savor their undivided attention. We’ve had some really fun moments on our own and those are just my memories and not my husbands.
So I think, that’s where my point lies. When you are not around – someone else is creating all of these wonderful memories with your children. That in itself is a painful lesson. Your kids will love you the same, whether you are there or not. There will be disappointments but in the long run – they tend to forget! Kids these days are resilient and they just move on. I think stay-at-home mothers get a bad rap. Don’t you notice that it’s often the most important jobs that command the least respect?
What I do know is that I made the right choice for me. If you are a working mother, I have nothing against you. It is a choice and a that choice is yours to make. My mother may have some regrets on her own but I don’t want the same regrets someday. I’d be the first person to admit that I’ve made too many compromises in my life. Now that I am a little bit older and perhaps a tiny bit wiser; I don’t want to lose sight of what is important to me in the end.
Though I enjoyed working and talking to adults; nothing beats an afternoon nap with my 4-year old or hearing her belt out some original tunes. I don’t think we should have it all; I think life would be too easy if we did. I think we all have to suffer some, sacrifice some and come to realize that the time we have with our children is something we could never take back. So once in a while, put down the camera or your work laptop and don’t log into Facebook/MySpace or Friendster. Instead, spend some quality time with your kids. You will thank yourself in the end …
rumours abound that myspace employees are leaving by the truckload, especially talented and knowledgable ones.
after 2 ceo’s in 1 year, and what looks like a corporate mess with 2 co-presidents and a CEO – all the signs show that this is a flailing ship. none of the clear, decisive actions that one would expect from a company in rapid growth – rather political games and no new product innovations abound.
so it appears that the additional management layers added by newscorp arent adding. not that it is anything new, often corporate management structures arent there to help the business grow and be great, they are there to help the corporate bean counters count beans more easily.
check out the article about myspace nearing rock bottom here and the one regarding the leadership mess here
Well I thought it would still be A for apple. You know the one with i. Let’s see what more surprises are in store.
Bad luck for Bank of America.
Another indication that the people are turning erudite. Disney manages to just get into the top ten.
Indeed, it deserves the position.
Still hot eh!
Now that’s a bit of surprise. No “Incredible” India, no ipod in the top ten list. Movies rock.
Again, that’s totally new for me. Seems like a low-fare airline. Yeah with recession hanging around, it shouldn’t be a surprise for many. But then, jobs should have topped the list.
It proves recession hasn’t hit the retail sector much.
Home improvement is a never ending task. Lowe’s on a roll.
Social networking is fun. No surprise here. Everyone needs a bit of space even if it’s virtual.
Avatar’s popularity must have helped this online radio major. The list also includes my favourite Pizza Hut. Paypal and Pirate Bay too find their name on the list. Notable miss: Playstation.
With every site providing options for status updates, quotes are more in demand. Well, a witty saying proves nothing.
What more can you expect when people are more keen in selling their homes. Rotten Tomatoes just manages to get into the top ten list.
This has to be the mother of all heart breaks. Tiger Woods and Twitter falls short and comes second and third respectively. Now who’s gonna tweet that?
In the age of super fast communication systems, the company has managed to stay on. There are two of my favourites in the list – urban dictionary and utorrent.
If it is the largest telecommunications operator, it is quite natural to be on the top of this list. Victoria Secret is second. vlc is there and the notable exception is Virgin.
Need I say anything about it. Wikipedia comes third.
Microsoft got one more reason to cheer about. Notable misses: Xerox and xe.
Youtube dislodges Yahoo! from the popularity list. Yellow Pages manages to hold on to the fourth position.
Yet another real estate site finds the top position. Zune sneaks in. And surprise surprise, Zoe Saldana is at ninth. It’s always rewarding to work with James Cameron.
the relationship you have with your superiors will certainly have the potential to be successful.
What if browser were women?
