In your face

I started blogging a couple of years back with the sole intention of improving my writing skills and to be able to express my views openly in public. When I write, I tend to write no more than three or four paragraphs in general. Honestly, who has the time to read through paragraphs of what you write on the same topic as the ongoing news or articles. Any news channel on television (FOX, NBC or CNN) or radio (103.5 FM) would give you a good coverage on what is going on around the world. Cell phones have news cast which is updated constantly and there are numerous websites which have newspaper online and of course the actual newspaper in itself is still there.

With so many news sources and news to cover and so many people blogging on what they think about the news and the news source, all you need is one more blog to say the same thing in different ways. Many will take out their swords (or pen or type?) to defend themselves saying that they need to write that much for effective communication. While I believe that effective communication is needed to get the point across, there is no need to write the same point in ten different ways in the same blog or article or for that matter on the same blog site. That is overkill. Pretty much many blog sites seem to be talking about their self achievement or how good they are in what they do, tooting their horn, given the fact that it is their own space for writing what they want. What do you expect?

I read an article on CCNmoney site which mentioned about how many different social networking sites are in place, like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Orkut, LinkedIn, Tagged to name a few and how they rank in terms of usage and the effects it has on work ethics. FaceBook, started in 2004, ranks first with users logging 13.9 billion minutes on the site in April of 2009. This site has many improved features like leaving texts to attachments to pictures. Ranking second is MySpace with 5 billion minutes, Twitter, started in 2006, with 300 million minutes with only text (“Tweets”) capabilities of 140 characters limit and LinkedIn with 202 million minutes. The article mentioned that FaceBook was lifting the limit of having 5,000 friends connection for a member. Seriously, if I had a FaceBook account (which I do and I seldom use it. Who has the time to post comments in all these sites after talking with your friends over the cell phone using the minutes?), would I have 5,000 friends? Who has that many “real” friends?

Many of these social networking sites are banned at many work places to prevent employees from wasting their time. Is it not enough that they waste time during work hours, browsing the internet for news, deals, shopping and taking a quick shopping or smoke or car maintenance break in between? A productive work day is only three to four hours out of the logged eight hours at any given office. I am talking about white-collar jobs. Of the productive time, some will go in meetings and discussions over the phone or mail. To top this off, all we need is access to these sites and instant messaging and then we complain about our falling economy and jobs being shipped overseas.