Tomorrow is the day my 2nd Newsday appearence gets published... the website was supposed to be up today, but it hasn't been updated yet. I'm DYING to see it... Very exciting stuff.
All in The Blogosphere
Link: News from The Roanoke Times -'Blog' wins place of note in lexicon and consciousness.
Nicely written article... "The word of the year is "blog."
Link: CNN.com - Publisher: 'Blog' No. 1 word of the year - Nov 30, 2004.
Jeez... this is all moving very quickly. I think I need to write the proposal for my new book before other people start jumping on this bandwagon. I'll do it this weekend.
Everyone, regardless of profession, should be using a blog to record their employment experience. Resumes dumb down years of experience to one page, failing to capture or oversimplifying the whole story. A blog that records, semi-regularly if not daily, your thoughts on your job experience, initiatives you've taken, self assessment compared to goals of what you think your ideal performance should be, and potential mistakes and what you've learned from them would go so much further to constructing a complete picture of what you bring to the table. Blogs are a great record of your demonstrated ability to think strategically and to communicate with written word--two of the most important attributes that employment candidates need in today's sales and service focused economy. There will be a time when blogs are almost as commonplace as resumes and employers check the blogs of the top resumes screened out as an interim step between the resume drop and the interview invite.
Blogs are much better tools than social networking sites to connect to others in your industry. Social networking sites are focused on the connections themselves, which is as forced and feels just as unnatural as networking for the sake of networking. No one wants to be seen as the person "working the crowd" to see whose cards he or she can get or how many they can dish out. Network development should be an incidental outgrowth of sharing of interests and connections should be earned by impressing others with your ability to bring something interesting to the table. Blogs allow people to demonstrate, before you make a connection, how insightful you can be about your field of interest. A great comment on the blog of someone else who is established as a thought leader may drive them to comment about your ideas, as well as drive traffic to your own blog and give you the chance to earn the respect and credibility of people in a great network. You can get tapped into a group by the sharing of ideas, as opposed to feeling like you are walking around with "hat in hand" when you are pinging strangers for connections on a social networking site.
Blogging helps you become a more insightful worker. Anyone who has written a book will tell you that the process of writing turns parts of your mind on that pay more attention, pick out insights, and develop theories about the subject you are focusing on. Your "mind's eye" looks for things to write about and attempts to come up with interesting things to write about. Plus, you find yourself striving to be consistent in what you think and write, because putting all your thoughts "on paper" challenges you to match them all up in some kind of unified pattern. You can't write one thing here and contradict yourself later. The same thing happens to people who start taking up photography. Whereas you might have missed lots of interesting visuals in your world before, part of your mind is now on the lookout for things that might make for an interesting photo, making you more observant.
Blogging can be a positive outlet for people who are dissatisfied by their jobs or "between jobs." A professional blog can be a great way to create something that keeps you thoughtfully engaged in your career in the face of a bad employment experience. Blogging might help you seek out ways to make your job more interesting or help connect you to people who are undergoing the same frustrations. Written in a careful and positive way, it can also turn into a great discussion of suggestions you've made to improve your situation or the systematic things about your position that make it difficult and how employers might examine their structure to improve things. (Of course, you don't want your professional blog to be a long list of complaints about your company or boss that might reflect poorly on you or get you fired). When you are not working, a record of thoughtful discussion of research is a better and more impressive use of your down time than not having anything to show for it except unsuccessful job searching.
Blogs need better ways of searching the "About" page. Standardized fields like industry, college, years of experience, areas of interest, etc. should be tagged in a way that allows me to pick out, for example, all of the Fordham graduates blogging in the investment field. This is incredibly easy to do and it would go a long way to making blogs more functional social networking sites as well as make it much easier for new blog readers to quickly identify who they would like to start reading.
Link: Consulting Magazine - The #1 Online and Printed Resource for Consulting Professionals.
So my friend Brian just called me up. He works for Consulting Magazine and is helping to lead their web efforts. I've been trying to introduce him to this whole blogging phenomenon, and, short of reading my own, I'm not so sure he "got it" until today. He was doing some competitor analysis, which led him to ring me and ask, "Are you familiar with RSS?"
Brian went from being a good journalist to an even better salesperson. He knows his field very well, and he certainly helped me a ton by editing my Stanford essays. But, he's never been a cutting edge tech guy, and its very meaningful to me as a milestone that RSS has found its way into his vocabulary.
Bagel breakfast is on Brian tomorrow, since he'll be picking my brain about what this is all about. At the moment, I'm at DTUT writing the outline for the blog career book. This is all gaining traction very quickly.
Ok, so I'm at DTUT right now and they have rented out the entire back half for a kiddie party. I think the birthday girl is about 1, so she really has no idea who all of these people are. Call me a cynic, but there's no point to throwing birthdays for kids who have no idea what's going on. Its more for the parents then anything.
Watching this whole scene play out has given me a great idea for a business. Someone could make a killing out in front of this place valet parking all of these strollers. First of all, these things have gotten like SUVs. Some of the wheels are basically regular sized car tires and I could swear that one of them had spinner rims.
This woman just asked one of the bus boys how she'd know which one was hers after they took the stroller from her to put it in the basement or something. ?!? Um... how many of them have purple ducks strapped to the side? If she was really that concerned, she'd leave something in it even more recognizable, like her kid. (Holy shit... ELMO JUST WALKED IN. I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. ITS REALLY ELMO... IN THE FUZZ...ELMO ROCKS.)
Of course, this kid has no idea who Elmo is and half of the kids are crying now. You know its more for the parents. I hear they're considering Elmo to replace Pierce as the next 007.
Oh, and how is this for sketchy. I'm sitting here last night and this girl starts talking to me. She goes to a local college and she's studying for exams next week. We start chatting and she breaks out with the "Its so hard meeting people in the city." So we talk about all the things we do in our spare time, like her world travel and my kayaking. We trade numbers and I wind up texting her after she leaves. Here's the text conversation...
Me: This uber-style conscious chic just sat down in your seat. She has this ridiculous fuzzy hat and is not nearly as interesting to watch... and yeah, I was definately watching out of the corner of my eye before you spoke up. I'm glad you did. Have a good night.
Her: Uh oh... You better watch out, u know what they say about women w/ fuzzy hats..! It was great to meet u... Perhaps we will meet up soon?!
So I go home, go to sleep, and then I'm back at DTUT the next day...
Me: Definately... what's your real e-mail btw? You're probably working tonight, but if not, you should come out with my roommates and I. I'll be at DTUT all afternoon, but they have a kiddie party here until 2:15, so I can't guarantee a seat.
Her: I work till 2am- blah! Thanks though! I must admit, i have a bf. Perhaps u dont want 2 hang out anymore b/c of that?
WTF?? I'm sorry, but what are you doing trading numbers with guys at cafes and talking about how hard it is to meet people in the city if you have a boyfriend??? That's just bad news... and I don't want to talk to her, but not because she has a boyfriend, but she's obviously walking a very thin line with being honest and upfront. I certainly wouldn't want to be her boyfriend. Now, if she mentioned it upfront and said, "Yeah it would be cool to get our friends together and hang out because we're so close by," I would have been totally ok with that, but that is seriously sketchy. Am I wrong?
There is so much out there that I don't know and it overwhelms me. That is probably the single most important piece of knowledge I have gained by getting into reading blog feeds. Jeff the Intern (www.galaksy.com) got me into FeedBurner after I mentioned to him that there were lots of VCs and technology people writing blogs. I downloaded it two weeks ago, and I'm hooked. Moreover, I'm hooked on just collecting more feeds. Today, I found a Fordham grad (http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/) who founded the Silicon Alley Reporter. Turns out, he also practiced TKD (www.wmaa.com) with the club I went to that got its start at Fordham. Every new feed/blog I've found begets another two or three interesting blogs. The growth of interesting people you can get connected to is exponential, and all of these people have tangential interests--many in media and entertainment, technology, politics, etc. So, you could be reading some guy writing about Bluetooth, and then bounce over to his blog adapting a kid--because these are all real people with real lives. I don't have enough time everyday to explore all of the subjects I find interesting and read the thoughts of all the people whose brain's I want to pick. Part of the issue with reading blogs is that there's no limit to what you can read. When you pick up the Times, you can read it cover to cover and that's it. You're done. There's no more to read. With the internet, you can click around forever. How do you know when you're done reading blogs when every blog has a link to another interesting article they found and links to four more bloggers?