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Monday, October 15, 2007

More layoffs at AOL

By Bob Keefe | Monday, October 15, 2007, 04:44 PM

Sometime Tuesday, about 2,000 employees at AOL are expected to get pink slips, becoming the Internet giant’s latest corporate casulaties.

In a note to workers that was picked up by the Associated Press and others, including former disgraced tech analyst-turned-blogger Henry Blodget’s Silicon Alley Insider AOL chief Randy Falco told workers (or as he puts it, “colleagues”) that the layoffs were necessary to cut costs after the latest in AOL’s repeated realignments in recent years.

AOL, a subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., has become something of a symbol for high-tech layoffs. In blogs and message boards Monday, some employees described how they’ve survived a dozen cutbacks so far, and have no desire to stick around for any more.

The job cuts AOL plans to detail Tuesday will take place over the next several months and reduce the company’s global workforce by about 20 percent, to about 8,000.

In his memo, Falco (or as he puts it, Randy) says the cuts will help AOL “build the largest and most sophisticated global advertising network.”

Of course that’s something the folks at Google Inc. - which coincidentally is hiring workers as fast as it can get them - is sort of doing too.

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Teens and the social-networking contacts they make

By Steve Pounds | Monday, October 15, 2007, 08:36 AM

A Pew Internet Project’s study released today of online teens found nearly a third have been contacted by a stranger via the Web, and a quarter of those felt scared or uncomfortable.

Girls (27 percent) are more likely than boys (15 percent) to report feeling scared or uncomfortable.

But surprising to me was that the percentage of online teens with social-networking profiles who felt scared is actually lower, 21 percent, than those without pages on such sites, at 28 percent.

You would think that if they open their Web pages to people they don’t already know, those teens on social-networking sites would actually report more contacts with weirdos.

Pew says the reason they don’t might be that half of social-networking teens say they use the sites to meet new friends, and may view an unwanted contact as a relatively minor “cost of doing business” in the online world.

It’s also worth reporting that 85 percent of those in the study who have social-networking profiles are on MySpace, so it’s tough to say what this study really means for kids on Facebook, Friendster and other teen-friendly sites.

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