SMRT breakdown
Posted by zllek in Uncategorized on January 1, 2012
Yes, I believe that the SMRT breakdown created such inconvenience in the past few weeks that it would be tough for Singaporeans to forget. First, the news of the taxi hike. Then the breakdown of MRT service during peak hours on 15 Dec 2011. “The disruption affected 127,000 passengers including 1,000 trapped in each of the four trains that stalled.” – these passengers were trapped inside for more than an hour.
Frankly speaking, they could have done a better job in informing the commuters that the trains are unavailable. Because this would affect the commuters’ decision in taking which transportation. As commuters, being uninformed would create great inconvenience like being late for a meeting with a friend.
Yes, the world has evolved where people of these generation like to have information on their fingertips in order to save precious time. These incidents has created resulted in SMRT to create a twitter account: @SMRT_Singapore
Most of their tweets goes “Trains are travelling smoothly today” – Good improvement but is that what commuters really want?
I keep on thinking why didn’t they think about social media to communicate their news early – before such things happened? Maybe it might be too much work for the corporate communications department, but it was essential. Essential to let commuters know whether they should ‘leave earlier for work’, in order to reach work on time.
Likewise, the traffic police should also have a twitter account – to let us know about the traffic conditions on the road. Especially since I experienced once that my bus had to stop as a tree branch fell and block both sides of the road. It took me about 30 mins to walk home.
Tips as a fresh graduate in the working society
The most important thing: Open your eyes and ears widely to listen and observe what your colleagues are doing.
Being a fresh graduate, you have to learn from the basics of all the basics. You must be willing to receive the work given to you, as it is a good learning ground and your attitude towards your workload would reflect well on your personality. – This is what I am being told. For me, I would be honoured when they entrusted me with any work because they believe that I would be able to finish it.
*Remember to always put in the best of your effort in your work.
Being a greenhorn, you have to adapt to the working environment at your company. Observe the different working styles of your colleagues and try to work well with them. Different people have different ways of doing things, so you just have to adopt your own way by learning the good working habits of others and avoid the bad working habits of others.
And of course, first impressions counts. It always does. This point has been emphasize millions of times from others, but it is a fact. So do well to impress your colleagues.
Listening to gossip is fine, this is to know more about the working environment. But never, join in the gossip. NEVER. I find that through listening to gossips, you would be able to learn more about a particular person/the organisation as a whole. It does help to know whose relationship is better with who, in order not to be caught in an argument or anything. This is one of the reason why I don’t dare to talk much in my first week of work. You never know who would get offended by your remarks. But when you have adapt to the working environment, it is always wise to speak up.
Frankly, I am fortunate to find the place that I am working currently. I believe the working environment is suitable for me to learn and grow. As I am still considered a young adult, going to be an adult (waiting for marriage and giving birth) yet I still remember how it felt like to be a child (student life- working hard to get good results). Hence, I fully understand when they tell me their problems in life.
One of my colleagues that is quite close, she says her daughter wants her to go home early to accompany her. Even if it was only a few hours earlier. I understand that because as a teenager myself, I would always wish that my mum would be home early to accompany me. It was probably the feeling of loneliness. So I understand completely when she said her daughter wants her home early. I even hoped that there was something that I could do!
Well, a few of my colleagues told me about their child birth conditions and about breastfeeding and things that goes along the lines of it. Apparently, after giving birth to a child, you are not suppose to bath/shower for a month or so. It is supposedly bad for your body because your body is weak after childbirth.
I have heard so many interesting stories that I can’t finish telling them. But I promise I will keep updating you!
Smart phones brings the rise of social media
Posted by zllek in social media, Technology on September 22, 2010
As everyone knows technology is evolving quickly in this generation, sometimes it is just too tough to keep up with the times. Social Media itself is being integrated into our daily lives that we cannot do without updating our social presence in Facebook and Twitter.
Especially with the promotion of iPhone 4G. Almost every household has at least an iPhone. With the iPhone, you would be able to update your social presence with ease – anytime and anywhere. You can upload photos of your latest happenings in the matter of minutes, so that your friends will be able to know what you have been doing. This allows people to update their social presence more frequently as updating your social media presence is just a finger-click away. Don’t you agree that more people are using the social media via their smart phones?
Personally, I like social media because it helps to share information quickly and accurately. For example, if you were trying out a new restaurant and need reviews about it from your friends. Your friend would be a more reliable source as they would be more frank in their reviews. And if you need tips on places to go for shopping deals as your friends would have the same taste and it would be more timely as compared to finding these information online.
Furthermore in the near future, the OpenNet (Fibre Broadband) would allow everyone to access online anywhere. The world is evolving, smart phones are necessary in people’s daily lives.
I realised that young kids are adapting to these technologies, they would use their parent’s iphone to play with games. Not like my childhood where we used to play the gameboy/board games/card games. Most kids probably started getting a handphone when they are barely 5 years old. Some people might be envious of these young kids, but I think they are missing out on their precious childhood and having a handphone from young can lead to complications.
Well, I wish the world would slow down, technologies and social media would not evolve too quickly.
Twitter Applications
Posted by zllek in New Communication Technology, twitter on November 21, 2009
As everyone knows, twitter applications are appearing to cater to the different needs of tweeples. As everyone knows, there are:
- TweetMeme
- TweetDeck
- Tweetie 2
- HootSuite
- Brizzly
- Seesmic
- Twitterfeed
- Twitterrific
I am sure you have tried at least two or three of these applications before.
Could you share with me out of all these Twitter Applications, which do you like the most and the reason for it? Just interested to know how people feel about Twitter Applications so I know which Application would be the best for me! Please comment at the bottom. Thanks a lot.
The wise use of Twitter coming from a not-so-wise person
Posted by zllek in New Communication Technology, social media, twitter on November 20, 2009
What the reason that you started tweeting?
For networking? Because everyone is on twitter?
With the evolution of technology, social media plays an important part in your life. No matter for work (business), entertainment or just to connect with your friends. Social media has become essential in daily life and is a tool used to market yourself.
My reason for tweeting:
Initially, the reason was it would be graded into my course requirement. When I started out, I was clueless about what twitter was used for. I had this concept that tweetples would tweet incessantly about mundane happenings in their life.
This was my thoughts till Stephie Tan -fashion nation blogger (@stephietan), guest lecturer for one of our NCT (New Communication Technologies) lecture shared with us about her experience in social media. Why her? As she is a frequent user of Twitter, established writer of fashion nation which lead to freelance writing on various magazine and she owns her own online shop.
stephie tan (not my image-not our lecture too)
She told us “Everything that is shared on the social media can be tracked upon” so nothing is safe online. So you need to be careful of what you post. Also she shared with us how she gets followers, “the topics that you talk about interests the followers” Therefore you must find your interest, then people would be enticed to follow your tweets.
With her sharing, I felt more inspired about the direction for my tweets and I began to understand more about twitter and the reason for tweeting.
Hence, my reasons for tweeting became:
- To connect with friends or family members or people with my same interest
- Sharing information with others
Hence the tweetples actually knows information faster than a person who reads the daily news. As information is being retweeted to their followers, it is being spread throughout twitter community.
And how should you go about tweeting? This is the simple way of what I learn:
1. Plan your tweets:
What you want to tweet about and what is your purpose for tweeting. It could be because you wanted to share the information, or you want an opinion about something.
2. Execute your tweets:
Considering what time would be the perfect time to get all your followers to read it and the way you want to phrase your tweets to make it interesting. You should also take into consideration whether you should retweet what you have tweeted (in order for better reach and frequency)
3. Learning from your tweets
It is very important to learn from your tweets in order to improve your tweets. Take notice of what interests your followers. Learn from how others write their tweets, how they manage to spark others’ interest.
4. Optimising your tweets
After learning, you have to measure whether it reaches out to your followers. Or else tweak the way you tweet about things – giving a different angle.
No matter what, you must always dare to try on the social media.
Podcasting and Social Machine
Posted by zllek in New Communication Technology on November 8, 2009
Podcasting
A medium/tool on the social media which your voice can be heard, you cannot forget podcasting! First you need to download the software, I recommend Audacity! Furthermore, you can download it for FREE!
I had to lead the class in this topic: Podcast. I love listening to podcast, especially MrBrown’s podcasts. I find it relevant to me as it talks about current affairs. Especially “your mother’s army”, check this out! The podcast is about the parents that pamper their child so much that they do not want their child to be negatively influenced by army’s language. I would like to see that in a real battlefield, I bet that this mother’s army would be in hiding, who knows if ‘your mother’s army’ might get killed trying to play the peacemaker. ^^
podcast
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
It is a tool that I noticed every website has, but I have never tried it before. RSS is a button at the right hand side of your url address.
RSS feed
If you are a daily reader for sports, the RSS Feed informs you when there is a new update about certain sports. This is convenient as you do not need to check the whole newspaper just to find the sports section. RSS Feed also ensures that you do not miss out any news of your interest. So now that you know about this button, remember to use it wisely!
Google Reader
Google Reader
The best website to manage your RSS Feed is Google Reader. It is really simple to use, first you must have a Google account in order to have access. Then you have to add subscriptions from the various websites that you are interested in:
add subscription
There. Saves lots of time finding for your news from various websites, you can see them all in one website, Google Reader. One advice: Do not add too many subcriptions! It might flood your inbox.
Voice over Internet Protocol
Posted by zllek in New Communication Technology, social media, Technology on November 8, 2009
For his week’s NCT tutorials we learnt to use different media tools that everyone commonly uses. Social tools that we must have basic knowledge of. Like Skype use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP),the cost is apparently cheaper than using regular telephone calls. So this is a really good way to save money!
What’s more, the costs of VoIP are lower because it is billed per megabyte (MB) whereas telephone calls are billed by the minute or second. I find this information interesting as it shows the difference between technologies now and in the past. Imagine the cost to calls overseas, but now you don’t have to take it into consideration as the cost is so cheap!
I can totally imagine that in the near future our phones will change to use VoIP, as the costs are SO much cheaper. However in emergencies, the phone cannot use VoIP so it will have to be merge of what the phone has now.
Singapore needs to keep wireless@sg, so people can use VoIP. But as you know it, wireless@SG is not stable, sometimes you can go on or off. Of course, the phone bills would have to go down, but there would be challenge between the three TelCos as to how low they would go!
Here is a video to tell you more about VoIP:
I love wikipedia because it is convenient to find all your needed information in one place. Here is more about VoIP. Benefits of VoIP is obviously its operational costs and its flexibility. The disadvantages about using VoIP is it is susceptible to power failure and it cannot be used in emergency calls. So handphone are useful in such situation!
Steps to being a professional ‘stalker’
Posted by zllek in social media on November 5, 2009
Patricia Law from Ogilvy PR was our distinguished guest lecturer for this week! Follow/ “stalk” her at @patlaw!
She shared with us her daily schedule on social media as a profession. She has to do media monitoring for her clients, which makes her read up to 400 Google Alerts per day. Astonishing fact.
She also gave us websites which she visits to track what is being said about a topic. This is important as we need to know what others are talking/complaining about us (brand/product), it is free feedback for us to further improve ourselves to satisfy others.
I shall list all the websites down at the bottom as it would be great to share the love with others as well!
Social Machines
cute social icons
Social Machines is the terms used for connecting everyone through the internet to express ourselves. Handphones, Laptops and iTouch allows you access to internet easily and is portable.
Hence we have websites like Digg, Delicious, Flickr and StumbleUpon.
Digg.com
digg.com
This website use the wisdom of crowds when you like the story you will digg it so others can see it, if you do not like it you can bury it. ^^
digg me button
Delicious
delicious social bookmarking
You can store your URLs, personal comments and descriptive tags in order to identify the web page that you want to find later. This is especially good for research. As when you research, you tend to forget which web page has which information. Wished that I learnt it earlier, it would have made my life easier.
delicious bookmarks
Flickr
Flickr
This is a photo-sharing site that allows you to add descriptive words, or ‘tag’ to photographs to make it easier to find for later.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon website
I will find it fun when I am bored, because you never know what type of website is next. Hence the excitement for using this. ^^
As promised:
Interesting websites to check out:
Daily updates about a topic, should try these: PBWIKI, Netvibes, Google Reader (love this), Google Alerts, Alltop, Technorati,
Social bookmarking (one that I highly recommend to use): Delicious
Topics that bloggers talk about: Google Blogsearch, Icerocket, Ping, Blogarama
The one-stop-shop(s) for specific words: Daymix, Whostalkin, Social Mention (recommended!), Monitorthis, BoardTracker, Omgili
Tracking topics on Twitter: Wefollow, Tweetizen, MrTweet, Twellow, Muck Rack, Media on Twitter, Twitterfall
Evaluating An Influencer: Tweetica, Twitalyzer, Twitter Grader, Alexa, URLFan, Compete, Popuri.us
Facebook and its uses
Posted by zllek in social media, Technology on November 1, 2009
For this week’s tutorial, we learnt about the uses of Facebook. Other than the common use of posting your photos, links and videos. For me, I use to Facebook to kill time by playing a few out of hundreds of games they offer.
Facebook has pages and groups which has different uses for different purposes. Pages is meant for big organizations, brands, bands, movies or celebrities who wants to interact with their fans or customers without a personal account. My friend’s brother actually set up a page for his band and I have to say that it is really annoying to get the messages from them. As you see it in your Facebook account as well as your personal email address. And honestly I am joining out of politeness.
This is one of the reasons why you should never spam your wall or your twitter account. People get annoyed after awhile and would eventually turn off the information that you are sending. Exception is if the information is interesting. Something that has substance – as @stephietan says.
Whereas Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Like what we did for our anti cyber-bullying campaign. “Online Attack, Offline Impact” – what you do online would impact others in reality. Click here to see our group and join it if you like!
The Wisdom of the Lazy One.
Posted by zllek in Technology on October 29, 2009
Wisdom of Crowds
The topic for the day was an interesting one, Wisdom of Crowd. It created quite a “hoohaa” in our class as everyone was amazed by such a theory that is proven.
For the Wisdom of a Crowd, the interesting fact is the crowd’s answer has a high percentage of 91% getting the correct answer. Surprised right? I guess this is the reason why in “Who wants to be a millionaire?” there is the audience option. Because they have 91% chance of getting the correct answer.
What is the Wisdom of Crowd? Well, Wisdom of the Crowd is the answers of many individual, by getting the average of all the answers, you will find the crowds’ answer to be closer to the right answer as compared to having an individuals’ answer. Hence, the theory of this is you will be able to learn a lot by gaining small piece of information from everyone.
I find the theory realistic as there is this saying “two heads are better than one”, which is the reason why we rely on each other for information. Right?
In fact, do you know that Wikipedia use Wisdom of Crowd? As Wikipedia is a website that people can edit information, hence everyone is contributing to the pool of information. This is the reason why Wikipedia a powerful source of information.
Do you know that actually an individual has only 64% of getting the correct answer. With the Wisdom of Crowds, it makes us seem smarter as our knowledge is pooled together. Don’t you agree?
Is Google making us STUPID? No, LAZY is more like it.
My class had a discussion whether Search Engine, Google was making us STUPID as we are reliant on Google for easy access to information.
I have come to realise that Google does not make us stupid, but lazy instead. As you know when you search for information, you want the information to come out as quick as possible. Hence when you go into a website, you will start scanning through the website right? But you won’t really read the details, because we think that Google would help us pick the website that has the information that we want and need.
If you do not believe this, you can try it out by yourself by reading a long paragraph. See if you really read all the information. Personally, I don’t. ^^
social media observations 