I’ve been perusing real estate brokers for rentals for the last few hours just to stay abreast of some of the pricing. Ones that I’m using include:
In the past I’ve also used:
Photos of the IMT540 final presentations are now posted to my Flickr account.
The slide deck from Steve Krug’s presentation in October has now been posted (original notes here).
I had the pleasure of hearing Steve Krug, author of the book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, at the Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting on the 25th. This is a great little book that’s been on my bookshelf for a while. Steve’s a great speaker and a deep thinker about the subject of web usability, so it was an interesting talk. Some of his key points:
I’ve observed an interesting phenomena the last week or so with my LinkedIn account: I receive invites from one person in a single company, rapidly followed by two or three people from that same company. This morning it was people from Blum Shapiro (which, to my knowledge, I’ve never heard of and know nobody there). Before that, it was Creative Financial Staffing. Now, just as a matter of personal preference, I take a “closed networking” approach where I only connect with people I actually know or have had contact with – that wasn’t always true, but has been for quite a while. This happens occasionally with different companies, which seems like an odd pattern to me. I’m assuming this is good (word is getting out about me), but given that the invitations are generic and come out of thin air, it’s hard to know what to think.
Update (5:25PM): I sent this post along to the LinkedIn Bloggers Yahoo! Group only to find that a number of them had also received the same invitations from both companies. That’s prompted me to mark the three invitations from Blum Shapiro as “I don’t know this person”, which, if that’s done enough times by a certain number of people, can lead to very bad things happening to your LinkedIn account. I regard such tactics as connection farming, or to put it not so nicely and squarely in the bin of rubbish where it belongs, spam. I normally just archive such invitations and move on, but I feel very strongly about people who indiscriminately attempt to connect to large groups of other people with absolutely no basis for that connection.
That said, connecting with individuals because you feel you can gain something from the relationship is not bad at all – some of my connections via LinkedIn happened for exactly that reason. But have a reason – don’t just send me a generic invitation in the hopes that I’ll blindly hit “Accept” just to get you out of my hair.
I’m currently a member of LinkedIn, a social networking service for professionals that targets executive-level professionals primarily but is open to anybody. I’m also (in passing) a member of OpenBC — a more internationally focused version of the LinkedIn concept. Between the two, my time is most definitely spent on LinkedIn, primarily because I have no real international connections. I’m also a member of Facebook and MySpace, though I don’t use either of those seriously either.
On the non-social networking side, I’m also a member of eBay. What do these five sites have in common? They all provide tools to network with other people (though eBay is really more about commercial transactions, it is still fundamentally networking). In addition, they also all provide a method to build an online reputation. eBay is the most obvious of these, since it provides its users with the ability to rate a transaction as positive, neutral, or negative – the more positive-rated transactions you have, the better off you are when you attempt to purchase or sell. The second most obvious one is LinkedIn, which, in a way, measures reputation by how many connections you maintain.
But is that really what LinkedIn connections mean? Not necessarily – in fact, in my case, that’s not really true at all. My strategy on LinkedIn is precisely this: connect with as many people as possible when I feel that having that connection would be beneficial to my work and future goals. Along the way, this has provided me with an opportunity to converse with several interesting people and to engage in conversations that were personally enriching. But none of this was based on my reputation – instead, it was based on my interest for their field of work and my desire to ask questions.
So what is an online reputation, really? I’m buidling one right now by typing this, and I will certainly be judged by my past posts, some of which are not always professional (this is a personal blog, after all). My tentative answer is this: your online reputation is definitely an extension of your real-world reputation, but only insofar as people know about your online work. I have a good reputation with a number of people offline who know nothing about my work online and cannot be influenced by it because of that, so the two are separate entities. This is certainly an open question, and one I’m considering as I utilize LinkedIn to grow a network.
I hate dealing with tech support people, over the phone or otherwise (though I have problems with the phone in general). At least part of this is because I am tech support, to a certain extent – my client work requires me to play that role (and, sort of offhand, so does my job in Evergreen’s Writing Center). So any example I can find that aptly illustrates just how stupid tech support people can be is just further proof to the whole situation.
Case in point. I’ve heard dumb stories from both the customer and the support technician’s perspective, but that one quite possibly takes the cake. My previous discussion regarding our experiences with Comcast not withstanding, this one’s pretty bad.
I’ve been sending out a few invitations via the social networking site LinkedIn lately. This is a web site that’s dedicated to business networking, so it has a job search feature and features that allow you to post your résumé and personal information for other users of the LinkedIn network to see. It’s a terrific opportunity to explore your personal connections and the connections that other people can, in turn, bring you.
Allow me to step back for a moment. What’s the point of such a site? Why bother to formalize your connections at all when it doesn’t bring immediate benefit? It’s not a safeguard at all – to me, it’s a way of articulating connectivity. It’s not about the number of links you have, necessarily — though the higher number of links within your business network, the more likely you are to be able to utilize the system for what it was intended for — but instead, it’s about allowing others to see the opportunities that they can take advantage of.
I have been putting some gentle pressure on friends of mine who are already on LinkedIn for exactly this reason – trying to see and take advantage of the opportunities they can give me. This isn’t at all self-centered, since, through my network, they can take advantage of the opportunities I can give them, whether that’s referrals for services or simply an opportunity to expand the number of people they know.
So, to those of you who have gotten an invite or are already connected to me, consider this a chance to see the kinds of people I know, have talked to, or have worked with. Some of them are truly interesting, astounding individuals.
After finally geting sick of having to manage two separate ways of viewing the same pieces of mail, I broke down and tried to find a way to transfer my e-mail into Gmail without causing too much pain. I found it in the form of Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader (GML).
I still wish IMAP had been available. GML doesn’t import messages quite the way you would expect — the date information is preserved, as is the sender information, but GMail displays the recieved date as being whatever time the e-mail was imported. Thus, messages from 2004 are now all labeled as being received within the last few days.
Most of the mail seems to have imported flawlessly, but I’m still confirming every message, just to be sure – pulling it up in GMail, then finding the copy of the message on Thunderbird. It’s a tedious process, but worth it in my eyes.
This has also allowed me to forward my Evergreen account and make my GMail account the only one I have to check, period. This might mean some updating of records in various places, but that’s okay. Hopefully, this makes everything a little easier.