Social Web: Positive side effect

What Sean Blagsvedt found after he was sent back to India by Microsoft to establish its research office there, was that poverty-level Indians needed a LinkedIn.com, he told the New York Times reports. He research found that "many poor Indians in dead-end jobs remain in poverty not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to find them." So he left Microsoft to found Babajob.com, which "seeks to bring the social-networking revolution popularized by Facebook and MySpace to people who do not even have computers - the world’s poor." This inspiring piece leads with the story of house painter Manohar Lakshmipathi, who doesn't own a computer and is of course not allowed to touch his clients' computers. So Babajob sat him down at a desk and had him dictate his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary, took a picture of him, and uploaded it all to his profile on Babajob - "just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: many of the hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of technology workers who are working here are turning their talents to fighting the grinding poverty that surrounds them."