Link Me In, Hook Me Up

Well I haven’t set up a Twitter account yet but I do have a long standing LinkedIn profile so I will web log about that instead.

LinkedIn is a strange beast and while it can be useful it has always appeared in the past to be something that people turn to when their job is under threat. Each time I have resigned, been made redundant or been desperate to leave my job I have updated my profile, made more connections, looked for people I may know, used its functions, etc. Then when placed elsewhere, I let it lie idle until I need it again. From many other people I have talked to this is what they have thought and how they behaved as well so I know it wasn’t just me.

Interestingly, I’ve never actually been successful in using it to get any jobs or job leads though, so I’m not sure why I kept going back to it. I suppose it does feel grown up and like just by using it you’re networking, taking care of your career, etc, and it is a Good Thing to do with low maintenance.

However, since coming to City I have used it rather more often and my pattern of use has changed. Now I do try to keep up with professional developments, watch conversations, link with people and so on. I go in about every three weeks and see if others have joined and try and scan the groups I am involved in to see what’s going on. I have recommended some people (especially the recruiter who got me in for my first temp role at City) and try and keep it current.

I’m starting to build LinkedIn into my general approach to social media and use it as a grown up Facebook. I would recommend that people join it, link up with those they know, search for new connections on a regular basis and keep it current because you never know when it will become useful. When I want to remember the names and positions of people I worked with at different places in the past, LinkedIn is where I go. If I want to see where they have gone, I use it. If I want to lurk and see how other institutions are dealing with the information issues of the day, back I go.

It may not have been a great help when job hunting in the past, but when did Noah build the Ark? Before the rain. Before.

The Sociopath Network

“Too many tweets might make a twat."

D. Cameron

I’m not sure how many of my beloved readership saw ‘The Social Network’ about the creation, rise and battles of The Facebook? A cracking film and when I left I was certainly thinking ‘That was so obvious! Anyone, anyone at all, could have created Facebook! How come that fellow came up with it and I didn’t? He’s stolen my billions of dollars the rat!”

Although I must admit that’s a pretty common reaction from me at times. I came up with the idea for Big Brother and the TV show The Trench years before they were made but my Important Work meant I took them no further than the early stages.

But Facebook? So obvious, so clear. It may be turning into a nightmare of privacy violation , targeted advertising and jury wrecking now but it is still very useful if only to share photographs and invite people to events. I’m not on Twitter, still maintain a MySpace account (for some unknown reason) and even have a presence on Virb though I doubt anyone has heard of it.

At work I encourage the use of social media (Twitter and FB) as we need to be where the students are and we need to be moving out into the ever changing frontiers of the internet. We need to create library presences in new spaces so that if our students run into us there they know that what they will get from us will be as reliable as if they were in  training session on campus.

This raises all kinds of issues of tone, style, responsibility, etc, but on the whole I now think it’s better to crack on and delete later rather than wait until you have a perfect webpage and approach. By then no one cares and the students have moved on.

I’ll set up a Twitter account later this week and see what limited character wisdom occurs.

Forging the Internet in Our Own Image (copyright approval pending)

"Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language."

Walt Disney

I’m sure I’m not the only person tempted to start this part of the 23 Things programme with ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’. However, I’ll swerve away from that and instead crash into the image week from a different angle and start with a quote from the leader of the Mouse House.

I never use other people images. Well, very rarely. Hardly ever. Usually that is because I can’t find just the right image or I have one in mind already that I’d use. When I do I tend to clumsily alter them in Photo Shop or similar as opposed to using them outright. For a birthday a few years ago I put my head on Rhodes’ body in his Cape to Cairo poster and have dabbled with WW1, WW2 and Warsaw Pact Cold War propaganda posters as well. I suppose I assume they are out of copyright, or that the Stasi are unlikely to file a case against me.

Images and pictures can really change a webpage, poster, presentation or document but they do have to be carefully applied. A series of badly added clip art pictures can be as bad as a droning monochrome PowerPoint, so the pick has to be right. I’ve added some pictures to this blog right from the start as they are a good way of illustrating a point and I really like the surprise factor in clicking on a highlighted word and then seeing an image which makes the point hit home.

Creative Commons is like the feature on a DVD player whereby if you’re watching a DVD, turn it off and then turn it on again later it starts in the same place. Really, really useful, a delight but something you take for granted very soon. Not being massively active on-line with images on a regular basis it has no continual effect on me, but I see how it makes it easier for many people to crack on with creating some really great stuff, be it Photoplasty competitions or B3TA or anything else.

But is it a case of trying to establish law in the Wild West when the West is infinite? How often do people get the knock on the door that their images violate copyright? Sure, if what you create becomes a meme or is popular you may get caught and the same if you start to make money and get noticed. But even then, are there effective sanctions? Those who are after you are very unlikely to have the power the film and music businesses have.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that copyright has become more flexible and adaptable to the modern world and as someone who’s future inheritance / income may well depend on an application of some form of copyright and intellectual property I want there to be rules. It’s just that in the real internet I’m not sure how many people follow CC or would be aware of it.

In the future they will doubtless look back at these past 15 or so years of the internet and see it as a really wild and free time. Even while I have been online it has changed and become more restrictive, more bound by law which has been positive and negative. More awareness of things like CC may change it further in the future, but who do you start educating and when?

Back From an Expedition Upriver

Well I managed to survive Glastonbury and now must catch up with 23Things. The total lack of external news on site meant that I thought the Conservative MP death was just a campsite rumour, so I’m pretty out of the loop.

Setting up iGoogle was simple enough, though I do turn that service off on my personal machines. I don’t like to be signed in everywhere especially as targeted advertising algorithms are becoming more sophisticated all the time and privacy barriers are becoming less and less reliable. That’s one reason I have various online identities and e-mail addresses for some parts of my nefarious private life.  

Ditto Google Reader though I find that to be a very cluttered page at least at the moment. I can see how it ‘collects’ together various threads but this could also be done via bookmarks or favourites to a degree. Maybe I don’t get enough information straight off the web yet for me to need it? It looks and feels very Web 0.9, like when I was first online back in the 1990’s with CompuServe.

What I had most problems with was ‘Thing 7 add feed from the 23 Things blog into your feed reader’. No matter how much I seeked and looked and scoured, there was no way that I could find that little orange button. Eventually I just copied and pasted it into the right area and was away. Later I saw that I did have the little orange button on some machines but not on others – the pitfalls of having lots of different PC’s with different builds, different versions of Windows and Explorer, etc. Still, got there in the end.

These functions got me thinking though – we set these up on a static / laptop PC but with the rise of the smart devices, how long will such services exist for? I really don’t know either way as much is new and not yet directly applicable to me on a continual basis. This will change (and is) but will the future hold services that seek you out as opposed to you having to add them to begin with? I stripped out nearly everything iGoogle had as a start page after all....

iGoogle is an interesting way to put lots of stuff on your google homepage but I don’t ‘get it’ yet. The other shoe has not yet dropped. I have not drunk the Kool Aid. The butter is still I the fridge. The metaphor is not yet a wholly positive one.

Experimentation is called for.