My Foray into the Blogosphere

I've been meaning to get a blog up and running for some time now. While blogging is nothing new, I have always derived great satisfaction and learning from discussions with other smart people. Unfortunately, I have also found that people posting racist, hateful, or ignorant comments can immediately derail a discussion's constructiveness. I have little patience for such people and will remove their comments immediately.

My Blog will be organized into topics spanning a variety of topics ranging from Social Networking to Middle Eastern politics but not necessarily everything in between. Rather, I'll try to stick to topics where I feel I can add some insight and feel confident defending my views. In particular, I'll start out blogging about a handful of different topics that immediately come to mind such as:

--Social Networking (What works/What doesn't)
--Residential Real Estate (Key learnings from having worked at HouseValues)
--Middle East (general political discussion based on my graduate work and living abroad)
--Job Search (what works/what doesn't)
--Latest Money Saving Tips (I LOVE to save money)

Given that I just decided to leave my current position at HouseValues where I led Product Management for HomePages, I would like to put pen to paper and start a discussion around social networking. I've spent considerable time perusing MySpace, FaceBook, and others and see social networking as a suboptimal experience that--while holding tremendous value to the consumer--can be improved by leaps and bounds. I've also been thinking about starting a social networking site that approaches this concept in a different way and also targets a slightly different audience. I won't go into the details, obviously, but will start a discussion about what works and what doesn't work on social networking sites. Stay tuned for my forthcoming posts...

Oh, and by the way, if you are a super share software engineer with 5-10 years of experience in web applications programming and want in on the ground floor of my startup, please shoot me email with your resume. If you look like a fit, we'll definitely talk!