Thursday, October 13, 2011

Drawing Inspirations From Films, But Check the Authenticity

I just finished watching 'The Social Network' on DVD - awesome Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) screenplay. This mega-site we share over 207 countries, is worth $25 billion. I was intrigued by the motivations behind the construction of this highly developed social media network. I like the sub-text of 'You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.'

I steered away from the film for some time until I was doing deeper research into social media, and crowd sourcing. Having read many reviews about The Accidental Billionaires, I decided to wait it out. The book by Ben Mezrich only interviewed the litigious co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, but not Mark Zuckerberg (he refused to be interviewed). The new book, The Facebook Effect seems to show more promise and another perspective to the founders of this social phenomenon. David Kirkpatrick (Senior Technology Writer at Fortune magazine) had complete co-operation and access to Zuckerberg; however, this version may suffer from its late entry after the book and the successful film.

This was a video produced and edited by our swim buddy, Dennis Quek. It is a summary of our day with the SAFRA Swim For Hope, held last Sunday. This tribe from Triathlon Family Singapore has been swimming every Monday, and on alternate Saturdays at the lagoon. It was a fun-filled day swimming laps that count towards charity. Our team swam in excess of 2,700 laps.

Evidence counts as proof of occurrence of an event. Word of mouth has some weight, yet anecdotal evidence is still subjective. Never confuse personal observation as fact. If it is an established fact, there will be published evidence of its existence. It is important to have enough breadth of knowledge before purporting to be an expert. One-sided perspectives are biased, so we need to possess a balanced approach to our opinions. If we have the ‘what’ but not the ‘why’, your stance would be weak and pointless.

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