Paul Maverick B. Ward

Web 2.0 Heroes: Interviews with 20 Web 2.0 Influencers by Bradley L. Jones, Chapter 9

Library Reference: none

Amazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/Web-2-0-Heroes-Interviews-Influencers/dp/0470241993/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224483069&sr=1-5

Quote: “We might be able to ultimately create a better business ethic in the world.”

Learning Expectations:

I expect to learn how Patrick Crane would take advantage of the Web 2.0 and use it for their benefit in LinkedIn. I also expect to learn the effects of LinkedIn in the lives of the people who uses it to expand and extend their connection and links to other people.

Review:

According to the 9^th Chapter of the Web 2.0 Heroes, Patrick Crane, the Vice President of Marketing at LinkedIn, provided a lot of people a way to extend their networks all over the world. He gained a lot of experience from all the high-tech and world-wide business experience from Yahoo! and Vodafone. He has a lot of insights to share to the public for them to know more about him personally.

Let’s talk about LinkedIn and how it gave people the chance to extend their networks tremendously. LinkedIn provides not just ordinary people the opportunity to expand their networks but it also provides the chance to some professionals that connect to the web. They can use the site just like a business card. This online or web-based business card is very efficient on giving out information about the person. This is how it works; basically the person inputs some information in the website. This information can be current status, previous status, school graduated from, the company they are working for currently, the degrees and awards that they had acquired during their college or education years and a lot more. Posting this information can give people the convenience on knowing things about a specific person. They would need the information because maybe they are going to hire the specific person, or the person may be looking for a job, and the like. The possibilities that LinkedIn provides to all people are truly convenient and make their lives much easier.

LinkedIn also functions for people to know how long or short their connection are to a certain person. A good example for this is if a girl would want to know how many the degrees are from her to a certain actress. The girl would just log in and add the actress to her connections and then she would just wait for the confirmation of the actress. When the actress confirms her request, she could then see how long or short is the degree between them. This is a great feature and help to all people who uses the web and wants to know more about the people around them. They would have the opportunity to know and gain knowledge and information about a particular person and they would know how many degrees or steps are they from the person that they would want to acquire information from.

This also gives them the chance to connect and create a connection to other people. Linking to other people is a great advantage for people to have. It is advantageous because having connections to others gives them a lot of opportunities. These opportunities can be a big break for a person because it will let other people to view what are the things that they have done with their life and from there the person would know the capabilities of the person who posted the information. Letting other people know the things they can do will give them the chance to be employed without even going to a certain place in real life. All they did is just posted information about them and let other people know about them. It’s that easy for them to link with others. Besides from letting everybody know they are there, the opportunity for them to get linked with someone who is a professional in a certain field will do great wonders for people who usually don’t do much with linking with others. If ever a professional gets connected to a person that person would be lucky because the doors for an opportunity have been opened and things will soon enough keep coming.

Overall, LinkedIn is something that people should use to expand and widen their connections and links to other people. It is a very useful tool to use because each and every time they post something in the internet or the web, the whole world is there to look and view their posts. It will be open to public and to all people who are using the internet. People should open their doors for all the opportunities that may appear each and every time they log on to the internet.

Lessons Learned:

I have learned how Web 2.0 was used by Patrick Crane and how he manipulated it with the use of LinkedIn. I also learned that people successfully extended and expanded their links and connections to other people especially to the professionals.