(From news-press.com) Mel King, the president of the Cape Coral Association of Realtors, said he can still remember when clients found home listings in street side racks and newspaper ads.

But with the countless ways to connect with potential clients, brokers and agents need to bone up on their social media skills, King said.

"We've had to evolve into a different kind of service because the customer has evolved into a different kind of customer," King said.

Some Cape Coral real estate agents have been tapping into new resources - mainly through the Internet - in an effort to better connect with potential clients.

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Tags: social media, technology, Web 2.0, Web 3D, real estate training

Categories: News

(From O'Reilly Radar) We're hardwired to play games. We play them for fun. We play them in our social interactions. We play them at work.

That last one is tricky. "Games" and "work" don't seem like a natural pairing. Their coupling in the workplace either implies goofing off (the fun variant) or office politics (the not-so-fun type).

Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo, co-authors of the upcoming book Gamestorming, have a different perspective. They contend that an embrace and understanding of game mechanics can yield benefits in many work environments, particularly those where old hierarchical models are no longer applicable.

In the following Q&A, Gray discusses the collaborative power of games and how they can cut through increasing workplace complexity.

What is Gamestorming?

Dave Gray: Gamestorming is a set of collaboration practices that originated in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and has been evolving ever since. It's an
approach that emphasizes quick, ad-hoc organization of teams so they can rapidly co-design and co-develop ideas. As my co-authors and I observed these practices, they seemed to look more like games than any other form of work we were familiar with. Hence the term "gamestorming."

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Tags: social media, technology, Web 2.0, Web 3D, serious games, gaming

Categories: News

Are social networking sites causing a decline in teen social skills? I think so. A majority of teens spend at least an hour a day on some kind of social networking site.

According to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 87 percent of 12 to 17-year-olds use the Internet daily and more than half of those teens use social networking sites.

Although I use sites such as MySpace and Facebook, I do feel they can cause teens to lose valuable social skills that can be gained by interacting in a more personable way. If you're creating a virtual personality for yourself behind a computer screen, you are not showing people the real you.

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Tags: social media, technology, web 2.0, web 3d

Categories: News