Parents, Google Your Child!

By William D. Jackson

As a presenter at two recent conferences, AME Youth Leadership Conference in Palm Coast, Florida and the Hip Hop Men’s Health Summit in Orlando, Florida my presentations focused on Social Media content as it relates to Bullying and Cyberbullying.
Speaking with over 300 young men at the Hip Hop Conference attending my session, there is a disconnect between teens, young adults and their parents. This motivated me to write this blog about parents Goggling their children to see what they are doing online.

Parents your child’s SoLoMo or Social Local Mobile online presence is influenced by their use of digital media, the platforms that provide a Social Media Presence. Technology has integrated, infused and intruded into millions of youth and teen’s lives. Students from elementary to high school have direct communication with each other 24/7 – 365, many parents have no clue to the connective power of Social Media. Presenting days earlier at the AME Youth Leadership Conference in Palm Coast, Florida students share how technology benefits their lives and creates challenges in Bullying, Cyberbullying and other issues.

The influence of Social Local and Mobile technologies is so powerful it can influence a student’s opportunities for college acceptance, employment, Internships, military acceptance and even academic/social performance in school.
The world is very competitive and students are competing for the best colleges and careers. Social Media has an affect on their positioning. The establishment of a student’s online reputation is determined by the content they create and post.
Reputations are influenced tremendously because the first impression society has of youth today is through Social Media platforms. Examples can be seen through the Trayvon Martin case and his posted content. So powerful is this that both sides of this legal battle are focusing on exposing or hiding Trayvon’s digital content. Social Media content has created a paradigm shift (Anthony Butler, Sr. E3 Business Group) in a youth’s reputation and their first impressions to the world. Parents your children should understand that their Social presence has far ranging consequences and what they post online never goes away. A youth and teens Social Media presence and content will never go away. There’s no longer the initial physical handshakes that create a first impression in a traditional manner. The handshake is digital, graphical and multimedia.

The middle and high school students in attendance at the Hip Hop conference were asked to take out their cell phones to reflect on the value of thinking and reasoning. The increase in Social Media platforms has influenced students even at elementary age (8-12) to spread their content across the world. Parents must understand that their children are cloning themselves across a digital landscape, their Avatar clones: textual, graphical and multimedia are on Pinetrest, Facebook, Youtube, Vine, Vimeo, Instagram, Socialcam, Twitter, Google +, Rebelmouse, and the list continues to grow.

Businesses and colleges are investigating potential candidates and those in their networks and friends to see if they are worthy of acceptance and hiring. The Google Me process is a safeguard or a stopgap to check what is visible from content postings. This should be done at least twice a month so parents can view what their children are doing and how they are active especially during summer break. Colleges want to make sure their students are not bringing controversial agendas on campus similar to the recent Boston bombing suspects. The best way to track or monitor a student’s psychological and emotional state is to look at their digital content. Looking at postings that are representative of the challenges and struggles, successes that a student experiences. Maybe parents need a Prizm to monitor their children online activity or in laymen’s terms create digital condoms to protect against posting potentially damaging content. Parent are concerned about who “physically” enters their home, but have no clue who or whom has digital access inside their homes. This digital invasion or inception is just as dangerous and pervasive. Parents should view their child’s Social Media pages until their child is at least responsible for their ability to financially support their access. Parents must set the foundation for Social Media use. The potential for Bullying, Sexting, Cyberbullying and Cyberstalking are a possibility as young men shared from the Hip Hop Summit.
In a digital society using SMH, LMAO, WT* represent the extension of emotions. Emotional drama is still present and influences discussions. Social Media trainings and workshops should be available for youth and teens to prevent drama that can be destructive in nature. Media elements focus on the negative digital life styles of youth as seen by the reports of Trayvon Martin. It is remarkable that the media can access a youth or teens Social Media platforms and manipulate the perceptions that will either offer sympathy or condemnation against that teen.Parents must understand what their children are posting and Google their children every 2 months to check on content, pictures, video and activities along with who they are associated with.

During my presentations terms I use: “guilt by association,” “responsibility and integrity,” and accountability and spirituality.” All play a part in youth and teens judged by the company they keep
and interact with in online environments.They are guilty by association because of the postings of friends and family. If teachers, law enforcement personnel, congressmen, attorneys, and other professionals can lose their jobs from inappropriate content a warning to be sure to see potential conflicts in SoLoMo Social Mobile Local content.

Teens now have global exposure and must be taught how to gauge their content. If a youth or teen is not responsible for their Social Media content there maybe far reaching consequences that transcend into the adult world. Maybe the Prizm is not a bad idea for parents to use or a programmer can create a Social Media condom to protect youth and teens from posting damaging
information. For now it is up to parents that are responsible and accountable to and for their children.

Summits that I have presented and participated in: the Education Summit in Jacksonville, Journey Into Woman Hood in Jacksonville, Jacksonville Urban League Leadership Summit, Save Our Sons Jax in Jacksonville, AME Youth Leadership Conference in Palm Coast, Hip Hop Health Summit in Orlando and the upcoming Man Up for Health http://ManUpforHealth.eventbrite.com this Saturday, June 22nd.
These summits, workshops, expos, conferences should be filled to capacity by parents, educators, politicians and those that represent all our religious and ministerial denominations. To empower and
engage parents, to strengthen families and build intelligent youth, teens and young adults that will lead us into the 23rd century

Blerd of the Month: Alicia Dixon!

We have a new Blerd of the Month!

Alicia Dixon is a steadfast and loyal friend of Blerdology. From hanging out with her at SXSW to working with her as a volunteer at the Blerds + Hackers Party, and lots of tweeting and texting in between, we have found Alicia to be everything that a #blerd should be. We totally love her and know you will too!

So who is Alicia?
Since August 2012 Alicia Dixon has been the Mobile Product Manager of the Technology Lab of a leading commercial printing company. The Tech Lab is a small group of a dozen employees among the company’s 1,400 workers. In this role, Alicia is tasked with championing clients’ transition from print to digital media through the development of mobile publishing products.

Previously Alicia spent 5 years as the Mobile Product Manager for UPS Logistics Technologies, a subsidiary of United Parcel Service (now Roadnet Technologies). At UPS-LT Alicia was responsible for strategic and tactical development plans for MobileCast®, a GPS based mobile resource management solution that is part of the Roadnet Transportation Suite®. This role included working with both customers and prospects in order to seek out prevalent challenges that could be solved using technology as well as moving the product through the many stages necessary to bring it to market.

Prior to her role with UPS-LT, Alicia spent nearly 10 years in product & brand management roles with Blackboard Inc., Dell Inc., Fruit of the Loom Inc., and Kids “R” Us (Toys “R” Us Inc.). Alicia holds a B.S. from Howard University, an MBA from Baruch College, City University of New York, and a MS in Marketing from the University of Alabama.

When did you first discover that you were a blerd?
I didn’t know that I was a blerd until Kat Calvin told me that I’m one! I had never heard the term before I joined Twitter. One day I was sitting in the airport waiting for a delayed flight and I came across an exchange between @AGinDC & @BlackGirlNerds discussing an article about how the new cool is to be nerdy. I started corresponding with these ladies and voila, I was indoctrinated. Realistically, I’d say I’ve been a blerd my entire life. I just didn’t know it.

What does it mean to be a Product Manager for mobile apps?
Product Management essentially encompasses everything that goes into getting goods to market and getting them sold. It is about recognizing a customer need then delivering a solution to that need in the form of something of value. PM entails strategy, relationship management, R&D, branding… really just about every aspect of a business that relates directly to that specific product.

How did you first get into product management? What kind of training/experience did it require?
I got into product management in the early 2000′s when I was reorg’ed at Dell. I got put into a new role with the title “Business Development Manager”. Essentially, I was a Product Manager for the consumer division, working on support services. Before that my experience was in classical packaged goods marketing and brand management. My first role where I actually had the title Product Manager was with a software subsidiary of UPS. Being blerdy definitely helped me get that position, meaning having a technical aptitude and ability to talk with developers in their own terms. I stayed in that role working on mobile software for a little over five year. Now I’ve found my niche. I can’t image working on anything but mobile software.

As far as the path to get into PM, I don’t know anyone who went directly into a PM role. It takes such a depth of knowledge and experience to be a PM that it is not a job that is normally given to entry-level employees. Most PM’s come out of software development, sales engineering, customer support or marketing. Having a graduate degree is common but not a requirement to become a PM. You definitely can’t be afraid of public speaking because PM are constantly making presentations. Anyone who has not worked in product management but wants to get into it should definitely attend a local ProductCamp.

What’s your favorite blerd movie?
My taste in movies is not very blerdy. I am more into action thrillers and romantic comedies than sci-fi or fantasy. People gasp when I tell them that I have never seen Star Wars and never plan to watch it (Editor’s note: Kat had to include this sentence under EXTREME duress). My favorite movies are When Harry Met Sally, The Godfather, el Mariachi & Boomerang – also all of the James Bond movies.

We love Alicia and we hope you do too! Follow her @specialLi1972 for great tweets about mobile, tech, and general blerdiness!

Hey #Newark blerds! You do not want to miss this!

Our new second home, the amazing Newark, NJ, is having a hackathon!! Just in time for the National Day of Civic Hacking, the City of Newark and Audible are hosting a hackathon virtually from June 1-8th and then IRL (that's In Real Life for you poser blerds) on June 9th!

What are you hacking? The City's new website! That's write, Newark needs a new design and where else to look than the immensely talented pool of coders and designers in the city?

What are you hacking for? $30,000! #nuffsaid Plus the everlasting respect and gratitude of one of the country's greatest cities. #reallynuffsaid

Who's judging? The mayor! A self-proclaimed blerd, I've heard it on the DL that he accepts bribes of pancakes, TNG figurines and friendly tweets.

Plus, kat from Blerdology will be in town, mostly because she really misses the NWK but also because she can't wait to see all of the amazing websites at the hackathon!

This is going to be awesome.

More info here: #hackNWK

Clemson receives $5M for alliance to increase African-Americans in computer sciences

CLEMSON — The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Clemson University a $5 million grant to launch the Institute for African-American Mentoring in Computing Sciences.

The institute will serve as a national resource and emphasize mentoring as the primary strategy for increasing African-American participation in computing under the direction of Juan Gilbert, Presidential Endowed Professor and chairman of the Human-Centered Computing Division at Clemson, and Shaundra Daily, assistant professor in the School of Computing.

“African-Americans represent about 1 percent of the computer science faculty and researchers in the U.S.,” Gilbert said. “We formed this institute to increase the number of underrepresented groups earning computing science doctoral degrees and researchers in the academy, government and private sector.”

In collaboration with its partners, the University of Alabama, Auburn University, Carnegie Mellon University, Rice University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Winston-Salem State University, Clemson will extend the work of current NSF alliances and demonstration projects that utilize different strategies towards broadening the participation of African-Americans in computing sciences.

More specifically, the institute aims to increase the number of African-American doctoral graduates who enter the workforce with a research focus; retain and advance African-American doctoral students, faculty and researchers in computing; and develop future African-American leaders with computing expertise in the academy, government and industry.

“Computing enables almost every sector of our economy and is among the fastest-growing areas of projected job growth,” Daily said. “The institute will not only mentor future leaders with established computing expertise, but also encourage underrepresented groups to explore the field of computing.”

The institute will be evaluated by an advisory committee led by Richard Tapia, recipient of the National Medal of Science from President Obama, National Academy of Engineering member and professor in the computational and applied mathematics department at Rice University. An external peer evaluation will be conducted by the Computing Research Association’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline.

END

See Article: http://www.clemson.edu/media-relations/4905/clemson-receives-5m-for-alliance-to-increase-african-americans-in-computer-sciences/

Yahoo to Buy Tumblr for $1.1 Billion

Marissa Mayer, Chief Executive Officer of Yahoo!
Laurent Gillieron/Keystone, via Associated Press

By MICHAEL J. de la MERCED, NICK BILTON and NICOLE PERLROTH

The board of Yahoo, the faded Web pioneer, agreed on Sunday to buy the popular blogging service Tumblr for about $1.1 billion in cash, the companies announced Monday, a signal of how the company plans to reposition itself as the technology industry makes a headlong rush into social media.

The deal would be the largest acquisition of a social networking company in years, surpassing Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram last year.

For Yahoo and its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, buying Tumblr would be a bold move as she tries to breathe new life into the company. The deal, the seventh since Ms. Mayer defected from Google last summer to take over the company, would be her biggest yet. It is meant to give her company more appeal to young people, and to make up for years of missing out on the revolutions in social networking and mobile devices. Tumblr has over 108 million blogs, with many highly active users.

Yet even with all those users, a basic question about Tumblr and other social media sites remains open: Can they make money?

Founded six years ago, Tumblr has attracted a loyal following and raised millions from big-name investors. Still, it has not proved that it can be profitable, nor that it can succeed on mobile devices, which are becoming the gateway to the Internet. Even Facebook faces continued pressure from investors to show it can increase its profits and adapt to the mobile world.

“The challenge has always been, how do you monetize eyeballs?” said Charlene Li, the founder of the Altimeter Group, a consulting firm. “Services like Instagram and Facebook always focus on the user experience first. Once that loyalty is there, they figure out how to carefully, ideally, make money on it.”

If the deal is approved, Ms. Mayer will face the challenge of successfully managing the takeover, given Yahoo’s notorious reputation for paying big money for start-ups and then letting the prizes wither. Previous acquisitions by Yahoo, like the purchase of Flickr for $35 million and a $3.6 billion deal for GeoCities, an early pioneer in social networking, have been either shut down or neglected within the company.

Because of this, Ms. Mayer will face pressure to keep Tumblr’s staff, led by its founder, the 26-year-old David Karp, who dropped out of high school as a 15-year-old programmer. It is unclear whether all of Tumblr’s 175 employees, based in New York City, will move over to Yahoo.

At the same time, analysts and investors are likely to question whether buying a site that has struggled to generate revenue makes sense.

“This is not an inexpensive acquisition, but they’re willing to pay to get back some of what they’ve lost,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners. “They want to be hip.”

In her short tenure as chief executive, Ms. Mayer has bought a string of tiny start-ups. Most of those were aimed at buying engineering talent that could help freshen Yahoo’s core products, like mail, finance and sports, as well as build out new mobile services.

Ms. Mayer has had ambitions to hunt bigger game, armed with $4.3 billion in cash from selling half of Yahoo’s stake in the Chinese Internet titan Alibaba.

She has had conversations with a number of other big-ticket targets, like Foursquare, a mobile app that lets users find nearby restaurants, stores and bars, and Hulu, the video streaming service, according to people with knowledge of those discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Tumblr brings something that Ms. Mayer has sought for some time: a full-fledged social network with a loyal following. The start-up claims more than 100 million blogs on its site, reaching 44 million people in the United States and 134 million around the world, according to Quantcast.

But in some ways, Yahoo isn’t pursuing users — it already claims 700 million, one of the biggest user bases on the Web — but products and services that would again make it a central destination. Once the biggest seller of display ads in the United States, Yahoo has lost market share to the likes of Google and Facebook. Its share of all digital ad revenue tumbled to 8.4 percent last year, from 15.5 percent in 2009, even as total advertising spending grew, according to eMarketer. Google now claims about 41 percent.

The company also missed the shift from the Web to smartphones and tablets. It waited a significantly long time to roll out apps for its most popular services, missing out on chances to harvest users to competitors like Google and Apple.

And while Yahoo has managed to grow internationally, it has struggled to make its familiar brand relevant again. Until a recent home page renovation, the company’s main page felt claustrophobic, with ads and content jumbled together.

Tumblr’s trove of users and pages could provide fertile new ground for Yahoo’s ad operations, with what industry experts say is a bounty of unsold ad inventory. Mr. Karp of Tumblr had eschewed advertising, favoring a minimalist policy, starting to serve users ads only last May.

Mr. Karp, the C.E.O., is expected to get nearly $250 million from the deal. Spark Capital, a venture firm in Boston, has been involved in five investment rounds of Tumblr’s financing and is expected to make tens of millions of dollars from the deal.

Yet it is not clear how much Tumblr can help Yahoo reach its goals. The blogging site burned through an estimated $25 million in cash last year, and struggled to raise additional money at an acceptable valuation, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. That prompted Mr. Karp to begin deal discussions with a number of companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and Google, though nothing came of those talks.

Yahoo and Tumblr have been in serious talks since last week, culminating in the Yahoo board’s vote to approve the deal on Sunday morning.

The blogging site has been trying to create new ad efforts like interactive campaigns, rather than using standard clickable ads, with mixed success. It has set a revenue goal of $100 million for this year; the company reported only $13 million for the first quarter and reported $13 million for 2012.

Despite its ranking as the 24th most viewed Web site on the Internet, according to Quantcast, Tumblr has yet to translate that into success on mobile devices, something Yahoo needs.

Tumblr also bears a fair amount of unsavory content that may unsettle advertisers. Pornography represents a fraction of content on the site, but not a trivial amount for a site with 100 million blogs.

The search for profits isn’t unique to Tumblr, as free apps and services struggle to wring money from their users. Instagram famously generated no money when Facebook bought it.

Mr. Gillis of BGC said, “Either this management team is going to turn Yahoo around or be the ones who squandered its asset base.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin and Jenna Wortham contributed reporting.

See Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/technology/yahoo-to-buy-tumblr-for-1-1-billion.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0