Right after the Virginia Tech tragedy, a lot was written about how social networks could serve as an emergency utility in times of a tragedy. Given the shear volume of people that are on the more popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace, if an emergency situation arose, the networks provide a platform to get important information out to the masses quickly.

Recently, A friend of mine had suffered a tragic loss in his family. It was completely unexpected, and his family had to act quickly. Once things became a bit more stabilized (as stable as they could given the situation), he leveraged Facebook to get the details out about the situation to people that were spread out all over the country. Facebook provided an excellent platform for him to give the details once, and it be read by many. This saved him time and not to mention the grief of having to tell the story over and over.

I believe that social networks and other web 2.0 products do provide a state of emergency value that can and should be leveraged in times of crisis. Schools can disseminate information out to all of their students at once, cities and towns could get important information out to their citizens, the list goes on and on. I think it would be wise for the government and universities to work with these companies to put the processes in place so the next time a tragedy strikes, the information is spread like wildfire and the negative impact of the situation can be dampened.

Let’s face it, if you are going to spend at least a third (8 hours minimum for the slackers, just kidding) of your day, 5 days a week at work, it should be fun right? I think it should, and I am betting a lot of other people feel the same way. Fun is like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Fun could be working with cool people or working on a really cool project or working in a really fun environment. However you define fun, I am willing to bet that you will find one of these elements in it. Fun fosters creativity and creativity leads to innovation and innovation leads to really ground breaking products that the world needs and loves.

As a business, you want to create the kind of environment where your employees want to come to everyday and pour their heart and souls into it. It is your job to create that sort of environment so they want to spend their waking hours their, building great stuff that will change the world. The happier you make your employees (and there are tons of ways to do that), the happier the environment will be and the better off all will be in the end.

Would you rather work at a place that looks like this:

Or a place that looks like this:

I think the answer is pretty obvious. So what kind of environment do you work in?