Tag Archive for 'LinkedIn'

Quick Updates: 1 February 2008

Published on 1 February, 2008 in career, content management, networks and communities, quick updates and software. 1 Comment
  • With my current contract assignment completed, and with only a short follow-on starting Monday, I’m back in the job hunt for full-time employment. On this day-one of making my job search a priority, versus a sideline, it doesn’t feel as scary as my last day-one.
  • I started using Twitter a month or so ago. I’m rsims there. I was initially resistant in the same spirit of how I felt about blogging, circa 2000 — who really cares about what I am eating for lunch? Well since then, blogging became valuable to me — initially as a regular reader, then later as writer — and now I am already sensing that Twitter will become the same. As I think about my own technology adoption, I’m also realizing this feels like Instant Messaging and Wiki, where again I wasn’t instantly gung-ho, but I now have trouble getting through professional life without either of these.
  • With the just concluded assignment, I had the opportunity to climb up on the SharePoint bandwagon hands-on for the first time. My overall impression was just so-so. It gets the job done; however, at least in our install it seemed fairly slow, the functionality wasn’t always the most intuitive, and I really missed having a full-function integrated wiki. Sharepoint wasn’t the focus of my assignment; but I could see the upcoming challenges of information silo-ing and the current confusion within the company relative to “when to use what for what” amongst file-server, stand-alone wiki, email, and SharePoint. Full disclosure: in my previous professional life I had been an Open Text Livelink power user.
  • Favorite recent podcast find: Stan Relihan’s The Connections Show focused on gaining value from LinkedIn and other professional networks and networking.

Quick Updates: 15 November 2007

Published on 15 November, 2007 in networks and communities and quick updates. 1 Comment
  1. SecondLife is another party that I’m a bit late coming to. Today I finally jumped in to get first-hand experience. This was in part motivated by Stuart Henshall’s Use the Tools First rant, but also an offer from within the local Organizational Development community to hold conference calls to walk their membership through their first SL experience. I’m in a session tomorrow morning. I download the software tonight to my new Vista machine, and promptly crash on initial launch. Dig into the support site, determine that my video card is supported, but doesn’t have latest driver. Off to ATI’s site to grab the lastest, install and now I can launch SL. Grrrr, not how I had planned to use the last hour…but glad it is tonight and not tomorrow to make the discovery and fix.
  2. I have a ‘Part-3′ of L&D and KM convergence post in draft, finally getting to the real meat of what if anything to do about the possible convergence — but the CLTI2007 conference is already sending my head spinning in this regard before I’ve had a chance to tidy-up to make presentable. Might be the weekend before I get this out. The of the moment observation: on first two CLTI2007 sessions today (and I wasn’t able to attend the third one live, need to listen on weekend), I couldn’t have made identification between a “L&D” or a “KM” audience…and I also identified more cross-overs like myself (Data-point) with one foot in each ‘camp’ from prior roles, to the extent that there two ‘camps’. Caveat being that this is a very self-selected advanced audience as noted in the kick-off session when 30% of respondents said they personally maintained a blog.
  3. Another post in the oven is a LinkedIn versus Facebook comparison and getting off the dang fence relative to the latter. Punch-line preview as that post could also be a long time (if ever) in the coming: I think I now “get” Facebook (again echo to Stuart’s rant above.) In Facebook it is much easier to really build some level of personal connection (closer to the feeling I get from my blogger-buddy and prior employer networks) and hang-out with your friends (real ones, including professional connections)…but golly there is a lot of ‘noise’ and immaturity in the system for that benefit. Plus, from what I’ve seen so for, the application functionality is really lacking for community-based sharing on professional topics (ala Yahoo or Google groups even)…despite all the people kicking-off attempts at that. How many overlapping ‘communities’ on a given subject can be sustained? I’m wanting to see the parallels to TRDev and Com-Prac to emerge. And all this has potential for a huge time-sink…ah, but only half of what the SL time-sink that I just ignited will be?
  4. I finally made the time to sort out how to install MyBlogLog in WordPress with the K2 Theme (which doesn’t use the default widgets interface, but something better.) Like with so many things, dead obvious in retrospect, but not dead obvious in the moment. Yet another post to write is more detailed instructions than at K2 or MyBlogLog sites, I’ll put this one on my non-professional blog. Web 2.0 doesn’t yet pass the “and my mother could do it test” — and this is from a son that has an amazingly computer literate mother for her age group. Hi mom!