I found this on the Web 2.0 Asia blog this morning: wetoku (Konglish. Korean-English, for "we talk").
Since I might start doing interviews again pretty soon, this would be a great way to do it. I wonder if you can also use it to record multiple users and also set it up to record podcasts? (I guess if it records sound, if you edit it, why not?) I have to try this one.
Posted via web from Regina's posterous
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This is a great discovery. Thanks to today's Thrillist NY newsletter: http://www.thrillist.com/maps/nycmugged. With looking for work and going into NYC for interviews, it's a guarantee that I'll seek out a coffee bar/cafe with wi-fi to park, plug-in and surf the want ads. Since Starbucks has wifi, and I've got Boingo wireless. I just plug in the zip code of where I am and let my Blackberry tell me where to go.
However, I'm feeling like I ought to give the smaller and independent spots a chance. I just don't know where they are, and I'm always ending up somewhere that's new to me. That's exciting but that also means I just don't know the layout. The trick is finding out where the hell they are.
This is where NYC Mugged can help a newb. For me, getting coffee or tea is a waste of money if I don't have wifi and a place to plug in the laptop. I'm hoping this will guide me to those spots. If you're not tethered to your laptop like I am, you'll have more of a range. This is a great idea.
So onward with more caffeinated wi-fi Internet surfing!
Posted via web from Regina's posterous
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Update: Things You Should Not Twitter is a funny site that is no more.
So enjoy the screen shots because that's all that is left.
Here is another site that got one shot I didn't: Stuff I Found
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This is just a hilarious site: Things You Should Not Twitter. I saw the link when Guy Kawasaki sent a tweet about it.
Yes, if you look on the sidebar of my blog, I've been sending out tweets like gangbusters. It happens when you're trying to deny that you're no longer just transitioning but are officially unemployed ;) However, the big move east will happen soon, and in the spirit of "it's rarely let me down before" optimism, I blame my unemployment on that.
However, in the meantime between doing some part-time research for a reporter in NYC (yes, I'm doing something) and looking for something full-time, I get distracted by Twitter.
Earlier today, someone I'm connected to sent out a tweet about what she's not doing at her job. Well, speaking of work, I don't know if that's the wisest tweet to send out. Twitter feeds into the search engines almost immediately. In fact, if I want to find a tweet and can't remember who did it, I'll run a Google search and I almost always find it in the top few search results. (That's exactly how I found the link back to Kawasaki's tweet.)
Twitter places very high in searches people. It's only a matter of time before waves of "busted on Twitter" stories start happening just as the "busted on Facebook" stories, like this or this one, and other social media sites started making headlines.
Maybe it's the fallout of a talk show culture. My generation was around when talk shows were a dime a dozen on TV. Now the Internet provides a platform for people to do the same thing without having to get vetted by a talk show producer and, if selected, spilling your guts in front of a studio audience. Instead, with social media there is no vetting required. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection and then you can do the same. However, when you do, just remember that, just like with TV, anyone can see it.
Click over and check some of these out. This site just started a few days ago and already there are some where you just shake your head and wonder why someone has the need to share that much. I wonder how many are jokes and how many are serious?
These are just a few. Click over to the site for plenty more ;)
However, I did have to leave the comfort of my apartment a few times over the past week. I got another Christmas present, a new job that I'll start in March, so that means signing a new contract and submitting paperwork so that the visa issuance process goes smoothly.
What's great is my new employer is a rarity in South Korea. The administration office is mega-organized and seems to have procedures laid out for everything from the application process to hiring. Since I hate disorganization, I was chomping at the bit when I realized that from top to bottom they appear to have their shit together. I'm hoping this is just an indicator that I made the right choice (I'll keep you posted.)
Anyway, I had to take the train to the college yesterday. It's about a 40 minute subway ride. Sleep deprived, but not wanting to risk falling asleep and missing my stop, I brought a magazine to read.
In my Christmas box o' goodies there were two issues of Good. I started reading with the Jan/Feb 2007 issue. In it an article by Peter Alsop, Sleeping with Strangers, caught my eye. It's about a website, CouchSurfing.com, that connects travelers with people who have no problem allowing a stranger to travel to their town or city and sleep on their couch. That was an interesting concept to me because I've done it. Not crash but I have let someone I met on the net, who wanted to travel, sleep on my couch. I was just happy to see that others are as unconventionally crazy or more prone to taking risks as I am, so it was the first article I read. I know there is a risk, but I really do believe that most people mean well and are good people. At least, so far, that's been the case in my life.
This passage from the article struck a chord with me.
In June of 2006, just as MySpace neared 80 million users and Facebook approached 8 million, an article, "Social Isolation in America," appeared in the American Sociological Review. The work of sociologists at Duke and the University of Arizona, it examined two national surveys of the American public, one in 1985 and the other in 2004. Their research found that the average number of people with whom Americans discuss important issues has dropped by nearly a third, from about three to two. Even more startling is that one-quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom to discuss their most important matters—twice as many as in 1984. This would suggest that in the same 20 years that saw the rise and triumph of communication technologies—the proliferation of email, cell phones, BlackBerries, and MySpace—our circle of close friends and confidants has shrunk by a significant margin. We are somehow more connected than we once were, and more isolated than ever before.I agree completely. I'm not suffering from a lack of friends, but I have noticed that I'm not making close ones at the same rate I did before I got access to the net. It seems that this is the case for other people too. I'm not implying a direct correlation, but I'm just noticing that with the increase in connectivity, ironically, I'm feeling less connected to other human beings. What that report indicates is I'm not the only one.
Some sociologists argue that sites like MySpace might not promote strong ties between people, but they do greatly enable weak ones. And these connections lead to jobs, apartments, and partners (for some people, Craigslist alone has provided all three).I owe credit to the Internet for many things like the great apartment my roommate and I found when I first moved to San Francisco. BTW, I met that roommate via an Internet roommate matching service. It was a great match. We are both insulin dependent diabetics and, since I'd just lost my parents, I really needed to live with someone I didn't have to explain the intricacies of diabetes management to. She also accepted that I'll always be in need of a housekeeper, and I kept my piggy tendencies under control because I liked her. She and I are still pretty close friends. Also, the Internet has provided job leads. I had a job last year that I did all from home. As I came here with the goal of travel, travel information as well as cheap tickets are plentiful. The Internet is simply an awesome place to find people like like needs and a place to find information.
Basically, it went something like this: relationships are like the magician’s rabbit in the hat trick except that in relationships it’s totally unpredictable what might be pulled out of that hat.
From my personal experience, it can be an endearing cute miniature bunny (like my dearly deceased miniature rabbit Mr. Bunny 
The challenge is will you be able to handle the rabbit eventually pops out of your beloved’s magician’s hat?
The conventional wisdom is you get better at this as you get older, but I’m beginning to question that as the last person I fell for completely threw me, and it was my fault more than anything. This was so much so that I realized that I wasn’t in love with him, but that I was in love with a fantasy that I’d put together in my head. When he performed his rabbit in the hat trick I was completely thrown off balance. It wasn't that it was a scary rabid hare, although sometimes it seemed to be, but it wasn't what I was expecting and it certainly wasn't what I'd fallen for. That was profoundly troubling.
I think one thing that got me off balance was being in a strange environment, yet assuming that people here weren’t that much different than the ones I’d left behind back home. I left San Francisco very open to seeing the world, traveling and learning about other cultures. What I didn’t realize was that people really are very different in some fundamental ways which runs head first into my belief that most people are essentially similar and mean well…or does it? I think both realities co-exist.
People are essentially similar as we all want love, safety and respect. I also think most people do mean well as I’ve been to many places and it’s rare that someone comes at me with hostility. In fact, most people I’ve met from Beijing to Berlin have been kind to me (less so in Berlin, but that’s another post). I think the differences arise when we don’t recognize those deeply embedded cultural differences that can turn an innocent faux pas into a huge offense and when we lack the patience to recognize what's happening and work with it rather than against it.
What I didn’t recognize was that even though I have a very racially and religiously diverse set of friends was that we were all young Americans pretty much raised in the same generation. Therefore, we share the same norms, have similar ideas of what is acceptable and unacceptable, and we have similar outlooks on the world. We also tend to be a fairly well-educated, well-read, opened-minded and well-traveled urban group of friends. Basically, we are the city and suburb dwelling middle class and up demographic that Audi and BMW are marketing to. What I realized was that my friends are more like me than unlike me in spite of superficial differences.
What that means is I went into the larger world thinking I had a handle on cultural differences when I didn’t. I only truly learned that over the last year when I had a couple of bull in a china shop incidents where I pretty much got responses I didn't expect. That surprised me because I thought I was Miss Cultured. The thing is when it crosses to interpersonal relationships things get difficult. That also leads me to the conclusion that the rabbit that I pulled out of my hat was probably more like that scary rabid hare than that cute miniature bunny.
me too!!!
I wanted to blog this because I like the number 1 thing on her list of things to put a stop to.
1) I will stop accepting friend requests on Yahoo, Orkut, etc. from unknown people. I know, I know, I have made a lot of good friends on communities like these, but it is too much of a strain on the resources to have to weed through all the creeps to get to the "few good (wo)men". So, I am going to give up all the potential good friends I may have made on all these communities and messengers by refusing to friend anyone whom I don't already know, either personally or through debates on some forum or through reading/commenting of blogs.
