Test

Audible is a great marketplace, offering a wide variety of product at an attractive price. Moreover, it provides a service that keeps the customer base closely tied to the website, searching the growing catalog for more content. However, I feel that it lacks a crucial contemporary feature that enrich the customer experience even more.

My experience with gourmet tea website adagio.com has shown me that social interaction between customers can encourage more purchases. Customers can use their website accounts to become "friends" with others and make recommendations or at least use the user-provided review rating to immediately let users know what their friends thought of a title. The analytics of a customer's library and reviews can generate information that can suggest "new friends" that share common interests (vis a vis Last.fm).

As Audible expands its customer base with sponsorships, new users with no personal friends on the site may have trouble picking titles. If something can be done to fully utilize the personal account of the site as a community tool, Audible could easily see a quickly adopted network between users. Reading, after all, is a community experience. Whether done alone or in groups, readers often find it enjoyable to share thoughts regarding books (ie book clubs).

Please take some time to review these possibilities if you have not do so already. I look forward to being able to socialize with new and old friends over my reading material.

Social Credit

To put the value of online transparency in perspective, let's compare it to something more practical. Anyone that has ever purchased a house or car knows how serious credit is. A good credit score and history are necessary for banks to trust them. To be trusted by the system, you need to expose yourself to the system. In many cases, this includes being in debt just to exist. Someone who pays for everything with cash technically doesn't exist, a persona non grata. The same goes for transparency. In a way, online transparency is a sort of "social credit". Having this credit adds value to your online persona. Even better, managing it allows us to do more, to be more involved. With it, we can invest in a better online lifestyle. Having no transparency results in social bankruptcy. Without an online identity, you cannot participate in community and commerce. People cannot find you, meaning you don't exist. Whether we like it or not, something that reflects us in the real world must be online for others to find. The next most important part of this, just as with real credit, is to manage it wisely.

Even though we hate to admit it, everything about us on the Internet is fair game for a background check. Flickr photos, Twitter tweets and general Facebook embarrassments are evidence to judge us. Of course, that's what privacy settings are for, and we would do well to manage our privacy with more scrutiny. However, there's a difference between having a findable, private identity and an unfindable private identity. Imagine this: a prospective employer (or maybe even significant other) wants to do some research on you before making a commitment. Preposterous, you say. Tell that to all the people you've stalked before going on that second date. In a time when we expect to find something on everyone, who has more social currency: the person with an online identity or the one without one? Sure, the former can be locked down for friends only, but what about the mysterious latter? Social networking may not be for everyone, but existing certainly is. What could they possibly be hiding that would result in not existing online? Logistically speaking, having a completely hidden online identity kind of makes it hard for you to make connections with people, otherwise known as networking.

WD Raptor HDD 74GB SATA I - $25

Corsair XMS 1GBx3 DD400 PC-3200 - $30/each, $50 for all

ATi HDTV Wonder PCI - $20

ASUS ATi Radeon 3650 silent heatsink - $50

Sony DVD-RW IDE drive x3 - $10/each

Sony CD-RW - $5

Linksys PCI 10/100 ethernet card - $5

Combo - 10% off

My current schedule:

Sunday - sleep

Monday - sleep

Tuesday - class 12:20 to 14:00

Wednesday - sleep

Thursday - class 12:20 to 14:00

Friday - sleep

Saturday - sleep

Obviously, I need a job. Currently looking at a CSR jobs at Sprint and John Deere and various clerical jobs.

Think there's any market for creating custom computers? Anyone that actually wants one is usually capable of building one themselves, but I'm sure there are a few people that would pay to have the computer of their dreams built for them. I'd probably do it for cost plus 20% for labor.

Otherwise, I'd like to help people with home computing issues, especially networking and getting onto the web.

Writing an 8-10 page research paper on Jekyll and Hyde for Brit lit class. Lots of photocopying and highlighting. Ordering wings. Listening to X-Files 2 soundtrack.