Paul Geffen

Like Twitter Only Louder

2011-07-19T21:14:00.002-04:00

Suddenly in the last day or two it has become impossible for me to follow my unfiltered stream on Google+. It's just too busy. I follow about 275 people now and I have tried to avoid the obvious sources of information overload, the professional social network commentators who can post all day because it's a job.
The same thing happened on Twitter a long time ago when I was following a few hundred accounts, but I got used to it. On Google+ I can at least check my circles one at a time, but it would be nice to be able to filter on some combination of circles, like "all except."

It's possible to deal with a fast (or crowded) stream on Twitter because a page full of posts has dozens of items and I can scan them quickly. The Google+ posts are typically much bigger and I can only see a few at a time, which forces me to scroll a lot.

Why Google+ feels like magic

2011-07-14T13:09:00.003-04:00

Ricky Jay is the best in the world at what he does, which includes card tricks. He sometimes works in Hollywood as an adviser on movies that include scenes with magic or poker. He tells the story of his encounter with an actor who plays a card sharp. The actor is excited and wants to show Ricky Jay a trick that he's just mastered. So he does, and Jay's response is "that's nice."
The master then points out that he won't show anything to an audience (or anyone else) until he's practiced it for at least a year. It takes that long for the moves to become completely natural, for there to be no effort.

Google has had Google+ in house for over a year. It was worth the wait.

The writer's web site

2011-07-12T11:59:00.001-04:00

I had a great time on Twitter last night in a conversation with a group of job seekers. (Search hashtag #jobhuntchat for details.) In spite of what I said about Twitter in a recent post, it is possible to have a serious discussion there. It's not as easy as it would be in Google+, but that's a topic for another day.

In the group was a writer who is looking for work. I was in a similar situation not long ago and after the Twitter chat I thought about how a professional writer would use a web site to get work.

Briefly, the writer's site must demonstrate three things:

energy
eagerness to learn
determination to succeed

Energy means both willingness and ability to work hard. A writer can easily show this by the quantity, quality, and variety of output. For example, a five hundred word post every day is a clear demonstration of effort. The posts don't have to be on one topic - a range of interests is a good thing. Quality in this context means clarity, correct usage, invention, and tact.

Eagerness to learn is vital to anyone who wants to persuade others to pay for their work. With rare exceptions, writing is a craft, not a fine art, and writers capture and analyze what's happening around them. Curiosity is a great asset. A writer's output can easily illustrate the process of discovery, exploring and gaining expertise in new subjects. Travel writing is a great example of this.

Success is always measured in terms of some goal. Successful people set their own goals as ambitious and also reasonable. Employers look for people who understand shared goals and who can align their work with the aims of the team. But the real test is whether someone will do whatever it takes to accomplish a task. That may include learning how to do something new.

The writer's job is to reach out and communicate, persuade, inform, and entertain. The writer's web site can do all of these things.

What goes where?

2011-07-11T08:29:00.009-04:00

With so many outgoing channels to choose from, how do I decide where to post a given item?
Now that Google+ is in the mix, does that make the choice easier?
Let's review the options:

Web Site
Blog
Facebook
Flickr / Picasa
Google Buzz
Google+
LinkedIn
Twitter

My web site contains my ECM database and the Richter discography, seldom updated, and links to the blog and to my profiles on other sites.

The blog gets the most thoughtful content, things to leave up for the long term, like this post. Blog posts have labels so the content is indexed and posts can be linked over time.

Facebook is strictly for people I know. The content is personal but ephemeral. There are no links between posts.

Flickr and Picasa are photo archives. I follow some great people there.

LinkedIn is the reference for professional contacts, great for research. I haven't done much with the discussion forums.

Twitter is the fastest and noisiest channel. It's hard to have a conversation there. It's like a crowded public house - great atmosphere, lots of ideas, very entertaining, but too loud to think clearly. As a result, I don't put much thought into what I post here.

Google+ is better than the rest for serious discussion - with Facebook in second place, except that the audience is different. I can interact with people on Google+ who don't follow me when we both follow the same person. When I comment on a post, everyone else who follows the original author can see my comment. That makes me visible to a larger audience. All I need to do is follow the right people.

Off On A Tangent: Google Hangout Weather Video Stream

2011-07-08T09:30:00.002-04:00

Off On A Tangent: Google Hangout Weather Video Stream

It was only my second Google+ hangout and it was written up by Steve Garfield.

Google+ takes off

2011-07-06T20:28:00.001-04:00

For the first few days, over the holiday weekend, I spent only a little time on Google+ (no more than on Twitter). People were writing about Google+ but it wasn't very busy, following about forty people.
Today things have really taken off. I've joined a few good discussions and done my first Hangout (video chat) and picked up a lot of followers in the process. As with Twitter, one way to build connections is to follow people (add them to Circles in this case) and see if they follow back. This works, but not very well. After I started to follow some of the better minds on the service (Bill Gross, for one) and added comments to threads they started, I quickly picked up new followers. I also found more interesting people to follow. The same thing happens in other venues but I've never seen it happen so fast. This is very very exciting process - a very lively environment.
I can't wait to see you there!

Google+ (more or less?)

2011-06-30T17:58:00.003-04:00

The latest social network technology has hit the technorati community with a bang. Everybody's talking but does anyone know what it's all about?
Google+ is a new feature of Google accounts, like Gmail, Buzz, Docs, etc. It has attributes in common with Facebook, Twitter, blogs, photo sharing sites, and a lot more. At this time it is by invitation only but invitations can sometimes be sent by ordinary users so this will spread through the social graph as fast as Google lets it do so.
The structure of the G+ graph is more like Twitter that Facebook in that it's asymmetrical. Users can follow anyone. If there's a way to block someone from following you, I haven't seen it. User identity is established by Google accounts, which are easier to create than Facebook accounts but harder than Twitter accounts.
Where Facebook and Twitter allow only a few options to group contacts - lists, friends, networks - Google+ encourages creation of Circles. These are ad hoc groups of accounts you follow. You can create as many as you like and then select one or more Circles to control what you see and who sees what you post.
There's lots more ... stay tuned.

JeffuPhonia

2010-12-15T22:08:00.001-05:00

Whimsical musical instruments by
Jeffu Warmouth

Google Chrome notebook email client

2010-12-13T19:58:00.002-05:00

What happens when you click on a mailto: link in Chrome? Normally, it brings up whatever email client you have configured. On the Chrome notebook, the email client is Gmail, and the mailto: link brings you to Gmail (mail.google.com) in a full-screen email mode. The options at this point are Send, Save Now, and Discard. There isn't a way to get from this page to the rest of Gmail and if the message is discarded, the tab closes.

Google Chrome notebook system info

2010-12-13T10:25:00.002-05:00

The Chrome notebook has a few things to say about itself.
CPU: Intel Atom CPU N455 @ 1.66GHz (two processors, each with 512 KB L2 cache)
Memory: 2 GB
Touchpad: Synaptics Pointing Device Driver 15.2.2.2
Bluetooth: Atheros AR30xx

More of what's inside here:
http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-13625_11-490945.html?tag=nl.e101

A few days with the Chrome notebook

2010-12-12T19:57:00.004-05:00

For the last few days I have included the Chrome notebook in my usual round of machines. I normally use four or five different computers during the course of a day. The Chrome has replaced an old Sony VAIO laptop in the collection and it's an improvement over a seven-year-old running Windows XP.
After a few days, the advantages and limitations of the Chrome become more apparent. I like the big screen (reported to be 1280 x 800) and I like the keyboard. I especially like the fact that I can shut it down and start it up very quickly, unlike the old machine. It's quiet and doesn't get hot. I've seen pictures of the insides and it does have a fan, just in case, but I've never heard it run. I can imagine getting a lot of work done on this box.
There are also some things I don't like: the trackpad is too big and it's hard to type without occasionally brushing against it and moving the cursor. I can't see two web pages at once. Google Talk doesn't seem to work.
The Google Web Store is a disappointment. Too many of the so-called Apps are just links to web pages. Wikipedia, for example, is exactly the same as an App and as a bookmark. It's just not obvious when to use a bookmark and when to use an App, now that the categories overlap. I find that I have both versions for some sites. Extensions also overlap with Apps and bookmarks. I have all three for Blogger, Gmail, and Wikipedia.
These are all usage problems that are the result of the collision between two familiar modes: installing apps and using bookmarks. When the browser becomes the operating environment, it's necessary to combine the categories but as long as both are supported it will be confusing. The two models are different enough that one can't replace the other but they do not coexist easily.

The Google Chrome notebook is here!

2010-12-09T18:04:00.006-05:00

Without a warning, out of the blue, via UPS, comes a thin black machine with no markings, no logo. All it runs is Chrome, and that's the operating environment.

Google has released a notebook computer to the developer community. I am honored that they made me part of this release. More news to follow after I've had a chance to play with it a while.

Features: no hard drive, no user-visible file system. The only way to add apps to this device is via the Google Web Store. Instant on - very nice. Automatic updates via the web, not optional.

The keyboard is not the usual 103-key version. Top row start with ESC as usual, but then has left arrow (previous page), right arrow (next page), refresh, full screen, dim, bright, mute, vol down, vol up, and power. No function keys. Also no Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up, or Page Down.

No Caps Lock. Instead, there's New Tab. The keycaps for letters are lower case.

Nice touchpad with multi-touch scroll. It supports both touch-click and a "real" click, like the Magic Touchpad.

The Web Store looks a lot like the App Store for the iPad. In fact the environment resembles the iPad in many ways.

The short life of Google Wave

2010-08-04T22:32:00.003-04:00

It was fun while it lasted. Google has decided to stop development of Wave. Bye!

Reflections

2010-07-28T10:54:00.000-04:00

The good news is that I am about to go back to full-time employment. My current contract position will be "converted" to something more permanent on August 1. It's time for reflection.

My experience of being out of a job for the first time after over thirty years - and after my first layoff - was disorienting. It took me more than six months to understand and appreciate the situation. From April 2009 until the end of the year I was looking for a job in a conventional but almost completely ineffective way: looking at job postings and sending out resumes. I did get a few interviews but these were productive only in that they showed me that I wasn't a good candidate for a development position because I hadn't written code since 2002. My knowledge of current languages, frameworks, and tools wasn't adequate - especially in the current market.

I did one thing last year that turned out to be crucial: one of the first people I reached out to after I got notice and before I left IBM was a former manager of mine who had recently started as VP of Engineering at Bit9. At that time he wasn't in a position to hire me, but he was my "lead reference" and I kept in touch with him throughout the job search.

At the end of last year I changed my strategy and did a lot of networking. I started to write frequently in this blog, started a second blog, spent an hour or two every day on Twitter and LinkedIn and tried to learn as much as I could about social network tools. I also started to go to local networking events: Mass Innovation Nights, Open Coffee, Social Media gatherings and Meetups. These are all free and great places to collect contact information. I was able to get my LinkedIn contact list to over 500 people (from about half that) in six months. I have over 900 followers on Twitter.

I also volunteered for a number of things: facilitating a roundtable at Boston SPIN, recruiting for the Founder Institute, and helping with the judging at Mass Challenge. All of these were valuable and Boston SPIN asked me to join their board for next year, which I was happy to do.

Networking didn't really help me find this job. I'm here because I kept in touch with someone and he and I work well together. But networking did keep me busy and thinking about professional and career issues every day. I think that's essential. When you go to a new place to interview, it really helps to be in practice in terms of meeting new people and explaining who you are and what you do. In-person networking forces you to do this all the time, but it's with a friendly audience. Try to keep your calendar filled with professional social events - and it's not hard to do that in Boston. Just look at Meetup.com - there are dozens of professional and business-related groups. LinkedIn also has hundreds of discussion groups, some of them local, that you can use to keep your name in the public eye.

The Gates

2010-07-03T17:05:00.002-04:00

The Gates, Central Park, New York City

Christo and Jeanne Claude
February 12 - 27, 2005 ... See my Tabblo>

Enthusiasm faded

2010-06-28T15:32:00.002-04:00

I don't know how it happened or why ... but when I look at Twitter today there's a sense of annoyance that's replaced the excitement of the last few months. That's right: the honeymoon is over!
Twitter didn't change, I did.
It may have something to do with the fact that I reached the limit of following 2001 accounts. Twitter won't let me follow any more because I only have 900 followers. They admit that it's arbitrary and they won't tell me how they decided on this limit. They do insist on it, though.
Now any time I want to follow another account I first have to find someone to unfollow. It's not hard to do that, any more than it was hard to find accounts to follow in the first place. But the thought of going back through pages and pages of "following" lists isn't a happy one.
There are on-line tools to help with the process. The one I've used lately is called Tweepi, "a geekier, faster way to manage Twitter."
I have also tried Twit Cleaner to find candidates.

When it rains

2010-06-23T15:13:00.003-04:00

I'm not talking about the weather but about the climate -- the local tech business climate.
Yesterday I was not happy about the state of my various professional roles. My contract at Bit9 was about to end after three months, I hadn't heard back from the Deval Patrick campaign, hadn't heard back from a new client about a proposal I'd sent him on Monday, and recruiters weren't calling me. The Founder Institute application deadline is today and I don't know if they want anything else from me. There were a lot of dead ends and dark tunnels.
Today, some of this has turned around: I had a meeting with another new client, my contract at Bit9 was extended, and a recruiter contacted me for more information about a job application.
When I keep a lot of hats in the air, I have to be prepared to let one or two fall so that I can pick up others. I can only juggle so many at one time. The number these days is five and I expect to have a revised list soon.

Viewsflow

2010-06-21T16:10:00.000-04:00

I have Google Alerts set up to email me every day with new mentions of my name.
Today's email contained the following:
Paul Geffen's view. This is the flow of @lpgeffen's views and interests. This is built from their public Twitter feed which we have been ...
www.viewsflow.com/user/lpgeffen
and I followed the link.
It's the first example I've seen of an identity integrator that works pro-actively to create accounts from the Twitter stream. It's not a bad strategy. In my view (as expressed many times on this blog) we can never have enough profiles that link to other profiles. Many of my web profiles have no other purpose than to confirm the identity (in the sense of equivalence) of a number of other profiles. As far as I'm concerned these are all helpful as they allow me to decentralize my profile information. I don't rely on any one site to hold profile information. Different services provide different levels of detail and as long as I keep things reasonably consistent the results are what I want: you can find me anywhere.

Three mentions this week

2010-06-18T16:56:00.003-04:00

I'm writing this post to thank three people who mentioned my name in their blogs this week.

Leanne Chase, John Moore, and Linda Kernohan all wrote about me in three very different contexts.
For Leanne's Career Life Connection site, I'm an example of a mid-career professional facing the job market for the first time in many years.
I wrote this post about The Founder Institute for John's blog this week.
And Linda reviewed the recent Boston Wagner Society concert for her very entertaining blog: Miss Music Nerd.

Six Twitter accounts - going strong

2010-06-16T22:03:00.002-04:00

I wrote a while ago about my multiple Twitter accounts. Here is an update.
I currently have six active Twitter accounts:

lpgeffen - my main account. I follow 1950 accounts, 870 followers, 2790 tweets, 63 lists.
PaulGeffen - a protected account where I follow only people I have actually met: 202 following, 57 followers, 265 tweets.
BostonWagner - our non-profit Opera group, 314 following, 193 followers, 391 tweets, 28 lists.
SviatoslavR - piano and classical music, 326 following, 186 followers, 240 tweets, 14 lists.
ECMSound - jazz, 151 following, 164 followers, 176 tweets, 14 lists.
triadex - vintage synthesizers and computer music, 84 following, 36 followers, 57 tweets, no lists.

I don't know why only one of these accounts has more followers than following. It may have something to do with the topic.
I work all of these accounts every day. Most of the posts are retweets.
The general strategy for all accounts is: follow accounts that are on the same general topic and retweet anything that's on the more specific topic. For example: follow jazz sites and retweet posts about ECM artists, or follow opera sites and retweet posts about Wagner.
The last three accounts point to sub-sites on trovar.com:

Two Connections

2010-06-15T16:55:00.004-04:00

Today is another good day for my social network connections. I wrote a guest post for John Moore's blog and I am the subject of a post on Leanne Chase's blog on Career Life Connection.
And in a few minutes I'm off to a meeting of Boston SPIN for more in-person work.

Five Hats

2010-06-15T14:07:00.006-04:00

Dave McClure has 500 hats, or so he says. (I heard him speak in Cambridge a few months ago and learned about a few of his hats.)
My own collection of hats is growing. These days I have five in active rotation.

UI/UX test for Bit9 - my "day job" in front of the computer.
PR for The Founder Institute - on the road and on line.
Blogger and journalist (here and on Twitter).
Marketing Director for the Boston Wagner Society.
Community Organizer and technical advisor for the Deval Patrick re-election campaign.

And in my spare time ... I'm looking for a job where I can do all of these things. There are a few companies in the Boston area that live on the intersection of technology and media: Constant Contact and HubSpot are the most prominent. The job title might be Community Manager.

Another elevator pitch

2010-06-09T12:17:00.005-04:00

My coach gave me some feedback on the last version of my pitch, so I wrote a new one - completely different in tone.
Here's what I do:

I "sight-read" software and figure out what it does from the point of view of an expert user.
I get up to speed on the product on the first day - with or without documentation.
I produce actionable results every day, either defect reports or usability recommendations.

Here's how I do it:

I'm an engineer and a developer. I know the terminology and development process details.
I can infer most of what the product (or interface) does from the UI.
I know how to talk to developers and explain what's wrong on their terms.
I produce detailed reports with complete steps to reproduce every problem.
I'm very thorough and explore all possibilities to find obscure problems and inconsistencies.
I recommend ways to make the product or interface more efficient, reliable, and friendly.

The Founder Institute

2010-06-07T12:57:00.004-04:00

My task for the next two weeks is to recruit Boston-area entrepreneurs for the Founder Institute course that starts at the end of this month.
I volunteered for this assignment recently. It was at the May 2010 Mass Innovation Breakfast in Waltham with Bill Warner that I met the Founder Institute partner who is organizing the course in Boston. He wanted help to spread the word about the course and I saw right away that this was an opportunity for me to raise my profile in the community.
This is my third volunteer position, after the Boston Wagner Society and Boston SPIN, and there's plenty to do. My attendance at meetups had dropped off recently because I'd found (temporary) paid work at Bit9. Now I'm back to where I have five or six events a week on my calendar.
Even better, the Founder Institute gives me something to talk about besides myself - and that's made it easier to network.

Here's a blog post about it from marketingstartups.com: http://bit.ly/boston-founders

LinkedIn Connections

2010-06-07T12:16:00.004-04:00

This morning LinkedIn reported that I had 499 connections - just one shy of 500. Today is the day that I reach the "500+ connections" milestone. (LinkedIn doesn't display the exact number after 500.)
It's been a long road. I started to build this list about three years ago while I was still at IBM. Most of the work of adding connections has been done in the last six months. It's now part of my daily routine and a complement to active in-person networking.

At the end of the day, I have "500+" followers. Number 500 is Leanne Chase, founder of Career Life Connection. That's appropriate because she is part of the media and marketing community. While most of my connections are in the engineering and technical fields, many of my newer connections are not. I've worked hard to be part of a broader community and the effort pays off in many ways.
(Connection number 501 is Fernando Fonseca, someone I haven't met in person but who helped me get started with Twitter and Google Wave.)

The 30-second Elevator Pitch

2010-06-05T21:31:00.005-04:00

My entrepreneurship coach gave me some homework this week. It was to write the "elevator pitch" for my next round of interviews.
Last year I worked on my resume and wrote both 30-second and 90-second versions of the pitch to use when I met potential employers. Here's the short version:

I am a Software Engineer and development Project Lead. Most recently I worked at IBM Rational software as a Project Lead and Program Manager, where I led cross functional teams through development, maintenance and distribution of Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest. releases. While at IBM, I successfully built a solid, record of on time delivery and high quality results and significantly improved customer satisfaction ratings for these products. I am currently looking for an opportunity to lead a product or test team in a software company or web services group.

I memorized it and while I probably didn't use it verbatim, it helped me to know what to say sometimes.
Now I have a different goal and I need to re-write the speech. Last year I was looking for a job similar to the one I'd left. This year I'm looking for contract work along the lines of what I'm doing now at Bit9. Here's the new pitch.

I am a professional Software Test Engineer and have been a developer and Project Lead. I currently work at Bit9 in Waltham where I handle UI and UX testing for the upcoming release of their product console. In my previous job at IBM Rational software I led cross functional teams through development, test, maintenance and distribution of Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest service releases. I know how to deliver quality products on time. I am currently looking for contract test or development work in a software company or web services group.

What do you think?

Shortbord example

2010-06-02T21:49:00.005-04:00

The image at the top of this post is from Shortbord.com.

OpenCoffee review

2010-05-26T12:17:00.002-04:00

This post is for Joselin and The Mike Walsh, who didn't make it this morning.

After four months of regular attendance, I hit the "pause" button on OpenCoffee in April. Today I went back to find the group just as busy and excited as ever. There were a few familiar faces and a lot of new ones, as always.

Old friends:

Janet Gershen-Siegel has a new position as Community Manager with Neuron Robotics - Congratulations!
Christian Picker is working on a device to help with mock-ups of iPhone apps.
David Kaufman
Ben Hron and Michael Cohen from VC Ready Law.
Reed Sturtevant and I worked together at Lotus many years ago. He's now with Project 11 Ventures.

New friends:

Ariel Assaf and I met last week at the Mass Innovation Breakfast where we saw Bill Warner. Ariel is bringing the Founder Institute to Boston.
Craig Krigsman is an IBM alumnus who has his own company: Mobile Middleware Solutions.
John C. Hopkins does business development for axway.
Alicyn Sconiers is the founder of The Sage Guide
Robin Lubbock is Director of New Media at WBUR.

Where are all my friends?

2010-05-11T15:35:00.001-04:00

The hardest thing for the "lifer" who hasn't got much of a life outside of the office is to build a social network.
Most of the people I used to see every day were at IBM. I had friends outside of work but typically saw them only a few times a year. I didn't have a daily or weekly social circle outside of the office, other than my immediate family.

When we got notice of the resource action, a month before the fact, I did make sure to identify my colleagues who were similarly affected. We met for lunch and kept in touch by email and occasional one-on-one meetings.
I had started to build up my LinkedIn network a few years ago, in part to keep track of people who left the company before I did. Even so it was six months after the layoff before I started seriously to build my network.
My LinkedIn contact list has now doubled in the last six months and is close the the magic "500+" level. LinkedIn is where I keep track of the people I meet, but's not how I meet people.

Last year I talked to a neighbor who had gone through the layoff process. Her advice was simple: find a local professional networking group and volunteer. I didn't know how to do that right away. I started with local networking events like Mass Innovation Nights and OpenCoffee where I could at least meet people (and where I felt more or less at home). I found these events on Meetup.com, which is an excellent local resource for such groups. Neither of these groups had the kind of structure that I needed in order to become a more active member.

Boston SPIN turned out to be a much better choice for me for a number of reasons. The topic of the group is Software Process Improvement and that is central to my area of expertise. Mass Innovation and OpenCoffee have a much broader audience and are oriented toward the entrepreneur. Boston SPIN also offered me an audience by asking me to facilitate a round table discussion on the search for work.

Happiness is the goal

2010-05-07T22:20:00.002-04:00

The title of a recent post by Leanne Chase on Career Life Connection was "Isn’t happiness the goal?"
Leanne included a graphic of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which puts things in this order (from bottom to top): Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization.
One thing that struck me as I looked at it after a year of unemployment is that the hierarchy isn’t as strict as it appears.
For example, it’s possible to maintain and make progress at the apex (self-actualization) in spite of losing some of the lower tiers, like employment and financial security.
When the higher faculties are engaged we are able in some way to “float” above the mundane. I’m not saying it’s easy for anyone to go through this but I do know from experience that practical insecurities can be conducive to spiritual development and not a hindrance.

Fiscal insecurity

2010-05-07T22:09:00.001-04:00

While still employed, the thought of losing my job caused dread -- and especially fear of financial ruin.
Fortunately, it didn't turn out that way for us.
There were a number of reasons for this.

State support is generous in Massachusetts.
The stock market did very well over the past year.
It is not difficult to live frugally when tuition bills are paid.

At least the timing was good. My daughter is still in college but we had set enough money aside for tuition a few years ago. We have one child and we don't need to support our parents.

State compensation was about a third of my earnings but it was enough to live on. We no longer put money aside for retirement and that had been the second largest budget item after taxes. Income taxes went down and we got a big refund this year.

We have no debt other than a mortgage.
Our net worth is significantly higher than it was a year ago.
We were prepared, even though we didn't know it.

New skills and latent talents

2010-05-07T21:55:00.000-04:00

For the first half of the first year out I tried to bring my (software) development skills up to date.
That turned out to be much too hard, largely because it had been too long - eight years - since I had been active writing code.
When I turned to blogging and active in-person networking it became clear that there were skills available that didn't fit my initial view of what I needed to do to get a job.
I love to write.
What got me going was National Novel Writing Month. Every November a few hundred thousand people make a commitment to write a fifty thousand word draft of a novel. I've tried it three times now. I have never come close to that many words but it has helped me a lot because the premise of the exercise is that no one will read what we write. It's only a rough draft. For one month, we just write as much as we can with no attempt to edit or evaluate the results. When it's done, we can look back and decide what to do with it.
I was able to do create some daring scenes, things that just barely made sense. And it freed me up to the point where I could write every day, from the top of my head, for at least a few paragraphs that did make sense. Almost all of my writing since November is now published in this blog. I'm happy with it. I've always been pretty good at writing even in the years that most of what I wrote was short emails. I've wanted to write a novel for a long time and I'll try again in November.

A Year Out

2010-05-07T20:36:00.001-04:00

It was a little over a year ago that I left full-time employment for the second time in thirty years. The first time, in 1996, it took a few weeks to get another job. This time around it's not so easy and in fact I have not yet "landed." I suppose it will happen soon, but that's what I thought last summer.
It's time for reflection. Much has been tried and much learned in the last year and some of it will be useful to readers. Some of the details of my experiences and discoveries have already been published on this blog. So far there hasn't been an overview and it's time for that. More than one article will be required to cover the topic.
Most of the time I write about what's close at hand, like recent events or acquisitions. It's much harder to take the long view. In February I wrote a guest blog post for Career Life Connection on the topic of work/life balance that covered most of my life from that perspective, so I know it's possible. Today I met Leanne Chase in person for the first time and she asked me to write another piece for her, which I was happy to do. The next few posts on my blog will be in preparation for that.

Gypsy

2010-05-05T16:38:00.002-04:00

I haven't written much lately due to time spent travelling. We were in New York last weekend - we drove down and back - to see Wagner's "Flying Dutchman" at the Met and to meet with our counterparts at the Wagner Society of New York. We stayed one night in mid-Manhattan and left town just before the bomb scare in Times Square. We got home just in time for the "Aquapocalypse" in Boston that turned out to be a bit of excess caution.
On the way down we discovered a delightful Swiss restaurant in Ossining entirely by chance. And on Sunday night we celebrated a friend's birthday at Arbri's Cafe, a fine Albanian restaurant in Roslindale.

Boston Media Makers and ScottEVest

2010-05-02T22:35:00.001-04:00

As seen today at Boston Media Makers:

Travel Vest made by SCOTTEVEST/SeV

22 pockets - all sizes
will hold an iPad or netbook
no need for carry-on bags
lightweight
Teflon-treated cotton/nylon blend

Boston SPIN Newsletter

2010-04-27T10:07:00.005-04:00

I've got an article "Build Your Personal & Professional Brand with Social Networking Tools" in the April 2010 issue of the Boston SPIN newsletter.
The article is a condensed version of advice provided elsewhere in this blog. Click on the "Your Internet Identity" tab above to explore the topic in more detail.
It's also an honor to be published on the same page as Ed Yourdon.

Open Graph and the Semantic Hierarchy

2010-04-26T21:32:00.001-04:00

The irony in the current debate about Facebook and Open Graph is that the social application of this technology is not the most powerful or interesting part of the picture, just the most controversial.
As I said in the previous post, semantic tagging (Open Graph is a standard way to do that) has the potential to allow the information on the public network to "self-organize" via automation. The other half of the mechanism is taxonomy. It's not really enough for information to have metadata, the metadata must also be related to a semantic hierarchy.
The problem this solves is that of "missing context" and the ambiguity of keywords out of context. Current search technology examines primarily (among other things) isolated keywords. That gives usable results only when the keywords are unambiguous. Searches can combine keywords horizontally - by proximity - but not vertically since there is no standard published semantic hierarchy that would support these correlations. Vertical correlation would help to specify the meaning of search criteria by providing context for the keywords and using (matching) contextual information in the dataset, when it's available.
These days we don't have much detailed metadata available to disambiguate data on the web. The work to create a comprehensive taxonomy of information is in progress and large areas are covered but we are far from able to give every statement of fact a precise location in a connected, unified tree.

Facebook and the Semantic Web

2010-04-26T20:25:00.005-04:00

The recent changes to Facebook, specifically the adoption of Open Graph technology that has started to spread little bits of Facebook all over the Web, worries me a bit. The changes are meant to capitalize (literally) on the huge user base that Facebook has built. It will almost certainly have consequences that were not intended - and that may turn out to be a good thing, as David Siegel explains.
Facebook's use of Open Graph is seductive. It allows a new kind of integration between sites, something much stronger than a hypertext link. The incentive for bloggers and site owners is clear: more visibility. The cost is small: a few lines of HTML.
The long term benefit of Open Graph, with or without Facebook, is also clear: semantic tagging of more of the content of the internet. This is part of the next wave of usability improvements for the Web. It's also a gating factor. With semantic tagging, a lot of things become possible: automated correlation of information regardless of context allows deep hierarchies to built and maintained by machines. As more information gets tags, more of the data on the web can gradually be organized into a single structure - a comprehensive taxonomy of knowledge. This has the potential to be something that no human being or group could accomplish, due to inherent limits in our intellectual equipment, but that machine intelligence could manage.

Right now the focus is on two aspects of the Open Graph: privacy and marketing. The first is a drag on adoption and the second is an inevitable side effect. The billion-plus community of users will need to learn how to cope with the privacy and publicity options and each of us will figure out where we want to be on that spectrum. Casual users will learn how to limit what they share and advertisers will figure out how reach narrow audiences.

The part that excites me, and worries me, is more theoretical and abstract. At this point it is a subject of academic speculation and imagination: what could the machines do with the ability to navigate and correlate all the information we've collected? What could be found by automation that no human mind could identify, due to limits on the number of things we can keep in our heads at one time?
I strongly believe that it's worth the effort to enable this process to move forward. (And by now it's got enough momentum that it will be hard to stop.) The benefits to scientific research are obvious.

More about Moo cards

2010-04-21T09:26:00.003-04:00

Last night at Boston SPIN we talked about business cards and I recommended Moo.
Today I want to continue the thread with some ideas taken from the latest MOOsLetter - their email newsletter. This company offers great resources for small businesses, and these include ready-made card designs:

Rulers - three designs - centimeters, inches, or both,
Quotes - eight designs - Churchill, Hugo, Leonardo, Picasso,
City Scenes
Dr Woohoo

and many more. You can also upload your own designs. If you already have a few hundred pictures in Flickr, you can select and crop them at the Moo web site. The whole process takes only a few minutes and the results are beautiful.

Boston SPIN with John Moore

2010-04-20T22:42:00.006-04:00

Tonight was the monthly Boston SPIN meeting. The presenter was John Moore, CTO and SVP of Swimfish, and the topic was "Using Social Media to promote thought leadership" which was mostly about Twitter for a skeptical audience.
This was also my second chance to facilitate a roundtable discussion on Needs & Leads. That brings together people who are looking to hire with others who are looking for work. We had some of both today, and we also talked at some length about business cards. I recommend Moo cards.

Google Buzz Button

2010-04-19T11:50:00.002-04:00

I've added a Google Buzz button to this blog. It's over there on the right, near the top. Go ahead. Click on it and see what happens.
The instructions for how to add it to your blog are here. This button lets visitors share my posts on their Buzz streams. I already share my own posts on Buzz.

BarCamp Boston - Day 1

2010-04-17T19:00:00.005-04:00

This weekend the MIT Stata Center is the site of BarCamp Boston 5.

What is BarCamp?
It's a free conference, or "unConference," with five parallel tracks of 25-minute talks by local experts on a wide variety of technology topics.
For example:

Hadoop and Map Reduce
Bob Frankston on the Internet as Infrastructure
Mobile Apps & Analytics
Kevin Bedell on Custom Cloud Deployment with Ruby and Chef
Self-publishing Geek Novels
Open Source Elections
The Next Big Issues in Social Media

and many others. I sampled the scene and heard parts of the first four talks listed above.

Among the people I saw in the crowd were these local celebrities and entrepreneurs:

The bulk of the crowd was students. That's the point of the program.

Hewlett Packard Print Cartridges Have Expiration Dates

2010-04-16T19:40:00.002-04:00

... and these are enforced by the printer!
I was surprised when my HP Officejet Pro K850 refused to print today. It was fine yesterday. This morning it said that there was a serious problem with a print head or cartridge (these are separate items for this device) so I ran some diagnostics. All self-tests ran fine. But the printer wouldn't run any print jobs from the OS.
It turns out that two of the ink cartridges had "expired" - they were too old! I replaced the (still half full) cartridges and now everything is fine.
Annoying as it is, I will have to give HP the benefit of the doubt and resist complaining of extortion. The fact is that I don't use this printer very often and the cartridges that I replaced were dated 2009. That isn't the date of manufacture since the replacements are dated 2011. The printer is apparently able to read this date and knows what to do with it. And my guess is that out of date ink may damage the print heads, and the print heads are much more expensive than the ink.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?

(Postscript: I did a little research and found that this behavior has been around for years. I just noticed, but it's not news.)

Mass Innovation Nights #13

2010-04-14T22:37:00.009-04:00

Mass Innovation Nights is a year old now. I discovered this event in November and this was the fifth that I've attended. It's starting to become familiar - like family or school or a club.
Although I didn't know most of the people at the event tonight, I did see these new friends and recent acquaintances:

many of whom I first met at OpenCoffee.

More photos from the event are here.

Presenters tonight included:

Opera for iPhone

2010-04-13T22:34:00.001-04:00

Tried the new Opera browser on the iPod Touch today. First impressions are mixed. I like the home page preloaded with Facebook, Twitter, and the New York Times. I don't like the way it zooms - all the way in or all the way out and nothing in between. It is good to have another alternative browser for this platform. There is always room for improvement.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod.

Waltham Innovation Lunch 3

2010-04-06T21:24:00.001-04:00

Organized by Chuck Tanowitz and Josh Bob.

April 15th from 12:30 to 2:00 PM at Jake's Dixie Roadhouse, 220 Moody Street, Waltham.

Already signed up: Apollo Sinkevicius, Stefan Reitshamer, Margery Stegman, Michael Raybman, Doug Haslam, Seth Lipkin, and me.

Check those blogs to gauge your interest, then sign up here to add your name to the list.

Bits & Pieces

2010-04-04T20:00:00.002-04:00

What's been keeping me busy and away from this blog for the last week or so is a new assignment - two months of software testing at Bit9. It was gratifying to note that it took only a few hours to get up to speed on the product user interface and start writing defect reports. Not surprising, given the number of web sites in beta that I've been visiting lately, but still nice to know.

I did make it to OpenCoffee last week, where I met with Alex Patriquin of Wattzy, Neil Gordon of Liquidity Matters, Shava Nerad, and Mike Walsh. This is one networking event that I will go to regularly. The others are Mass Innovation Nights and the Mass Innovation Breakfast.

Boston Media Makers - April 2010

2010-04-04T12:48:00.003-04:00

Doyles Cafe, Easter Sunday 2010. Photo panorama by Steve Garfield, cropped by Paul Geffen.
My second visit to this event. Last month Steve was in Hollywood. This month he was in Boston.
Today I met Alecia Orsini, filmmaker, actress, and production designer,
David J. Bolton, who writes the blog Limeyview from the perspective of a resident alien,
and Michael D. Murie, who allowed me to explore his new iPad.
Here is a YouTube video of Steve Garfield from this Meetup.

Fellow Bloggers: Seth and Alan

2010-03-28T19:58:00.003-04:00

I just visited two blogs to see what else one might write about.
Alan Cooper has been called the Father of Visual Basic and he recently started a blog called Playwell.
Seth Godin has been blogging for a long time. The latest post on Seth's blog refers to blogging as a "performing art" and I certainly agree with that.
Alan writes that Seth's blog posts are "shockingly brief" but I do not agree. Many of my own posts are short, but then there's Twitter ...

Shortbord

2010-03-24T21:41:00.001-04:00

Boston startup currently in beta. Shortbord.com (that's the way they spell it) for web surfers - puts brand icons next to your posts on Facebook and Twitter. Or so they claim. I joined a few weeks ago and just checked in again today and signed up for two ads: ASPCA and Steve Garfield's book "Get Seen!"

Rally

2010-03-23T22:22:00.002-04:00

Local experts say Rally "blows Plancast away."
I guess I'll try it. See you there!

OK - I tried it.
Rally shows you items from your Twitter stream that call out events, sorted by date. At least that's what I think it's trying to do. It seems to get a lot of false positives - things that don't look like plans to me.
Give it time. It's still in beta.
Rally lets you create events and subscribe to events. It keeps track of the events, like Plancast, so that you can see who else signed up for one that you created or joined.

Retaggr and card.ly

2010-03-21T22:29:00.004-04:00

One more site for today: Retaggr.
This is an aggregator of network profiles. It has one of the longest list of social sites that I have seen. You can create a profile card - like card.ly - and a complete profile page that lists all your site affiliations. You can also give it your basic contact info to share with your friends or with the world.
Here is my profile on Retaggr.
And my profile on card.ly.

Skype

2010-03-21T22:25:00.001-04:00

Don't know how I missed this one.
Skype is an "alternative" phone service that also lets you chat - free - with other members. It's another social network that I just joined. My id there is the same as my id on many other sites: lpgeffen.

oneforty

2010-03-21T18:58:00.001-04:00

oneforty.com
is the Twitter App Store. If you use Twitter, you will find lots of free apps and web services here.
My last visit turned up this great utility:
TweetStats and here is what my stats look like.

Miso

2010-03-21T18:30:00.002-04:00

Not soup.
This is an iPhone app that's been described as "Foursquare for people who stay home." Instead of checking in to say where you are, you check in to say what you're doing. Or watching.
Find it in the App Store where it is known as "Miso Movie sharing on Facebook" and is free.

Flavors

2010-03-21T13:42:00.002-04:00

A simple way to create a colorful page for yourself:
Flavors.me
Here's mine:
http://flavors.me/lpgeffen
The page has links to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and this blog.

Sites in Beta

2010-03-17T22:54:00.000-04:00

One of the best things about this job is that I get to see a lot of new sites in beta.
Today's email included an announcement from Threadsy - they have a new look. They promise to have:

Social media email signatures
Ability to edit retweets
Way to easily share tweets on Facebook

in the near future. Threadsy is a web site that shows Facebook, Twitter, email, and chat in a single stream. No more browser tabs. The beta is "private" but current users can invite friends.

Boston SPIN

2010-03-16T23:01:00.004-04:00

I went to an important networking event for the first time: Boston SPIN.
The Boston Software Process Improvement Network has been around since 1992 and is one of many SPINs in the US. I heard about it last year from colleagues and today was the first time I attended. The meetings include networking, roundtables, and an hour-long presentation. Today's speaker was Ed Yourdon, a legend in the field of software methodology. He gave a talk on "Death March Projects in Today's Hard Times." You can find the slides for the talk on his web site.

I wasn't expecting to, but I did facilitate one of the roundtable discussions. (Maybe "facilitate" isn't the right word.) The "Leads and Needs" table was meant to be a way for people to share job leads and requests for expertise but since I had the floor I turned it into a presentation about how to build your personal and professional brand using social network tools. Just like this blog. And I plan to go back and do it again next month!
I also plan to contribute an article to the Boston SPIN monthly newsletter. The editor is Abby Fichter, better known as Hacker Chick.

If you are a Boston-area software professional then please come to the next Boston SPIN meeting on April 20, 2010, on the campus of MITRE Corporation in Bedford. Details are on the Boston SPIN web site.

ShowYourself Widget

2010-03-14T19:51:00.002-04:00

Here's a nice little utility for your blog or web site.
ShowYourself
It lets you display a list of links to popular social network profiles, like this:

Raised on radio

2010-03-11T22:36:00.002-05:00

One of the early electronic social media experiments was conducted in this area many years ago.
In the late 1960s, New York City invented Talk Radio. It's so common now that we take it for granted but forty years ago the idea of opening the phones and giving air time to just about anyone was new and dangerous. The hosts had to make frequent use of the seven-second delay that gave them a chance to prevent callers from violating FCC regulations.

Blogger in draft

2010-03-11T13:35:00.005-05:00

Google has announced a new template designer for Blogger - the platform that hosts this blog - and I have enabled it. Here's an article from ReadWriteWeb that explains the changes. Blog writers can now edit the template used to control the appearance of the page. You can see the results here.

New background image
Tabbed pages for categories

Photo by Paul Geffen, Naumkeag, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Mass Innovation Nights #12

2010-03-10T21:59:00.003-05:00

Four months ago - last November - was my first visit to Mass Innovation Nights. That meeting was at the Charles River Museum of Industry and that's where we met again tonight. I didn't write up the November event (I did write about the January meeting at the IBM Waltham offices).
Tonight's event was well-attended and featured Tweetworks. Mike Langford showed the new Tweetworks iPhone app - not yet in the App Store - and I hope to get a chance to try it in beta.

Other exhibitors/presenters included bite, thredUP, and Searchandize Commerce.
There were (apparently) no expert sessions, unlike previous MassInno events. The organizers also made better use of the space this time by moving exhibitors downstairs and holding the presentations in the big room upstairs instead of the amphitheater.

Boston Media Makers

2010-03-07T13:00:00.007-05:00

My first visit to Boston Media Makers today - and a good time was had by all forty or fifty participants.
The meeting was facilitated by Diane Darling as Steve Garfield was in Hollywood for the Oscars. The venue was Doyles Cafe in Jamaica Plain. (No apostrophe and no accent on the final "e" in the name of the public house.)
I met some new people. In fact, the only people I already knew were Mike Walsh and Mike Grover. New to my contact list are: Adam Weiss, Roy Krantz, Zoe Susice, Ari Herzog, Diane Darling, Ed Justen, Bruce Garber, and Tapeleg.
Visit Bruce Garber's site for the video roll call where everyone at the meeting introduced themselves.
I plan to go back next month.

Just six words to describe you

2010-03-05T11:14:00.004-05:00

The title of this post uses six words to describe the subject.
The idea comes from these fellow bloggers:
Tomato Baby Blog
Monkey With Glasses
Pie Bird Blog

Just six words?
How about: technology works like magic for me.
Or: will return to expand this post.

By the way, this is part of a collection of similar posts at Seeded Buzz.

Content is Everything

2010-03-05T08:56:00.004-05:00

Most of the information on this blog is tactical in nature and most of it is useful no matter what your social network strategy. The techniques and tools are general purpose and they don't - in themselves - define what you are going to do with your web presence.
This discussion revolves around the tools because your strategy may change while the technology will evolve on its own. In other words, the strategy is something that you control and technology is the way to realize your goals. I can't tell you much about your strategy except that it will change in response to conditions. Sometimes it will even change drastically as a result of success. (See Gary V for example.) That's entirely up to you. What this blog can do is help you build expertise in the available tools and in the art of selecting the right approach to support your strategy, whatever it is.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I do want to say a few words about strategy - and goals.
My strategy with this blog and the web branding effort that it describes is to build my expertise in marketing. That expertise is necessary for me to make progress toward my goal: to build my network of business partners.
Your goal may be different. You may want to find a job, extend your influence, or share your passion for art. These goals all have something in common: network and community.
Your goals will determine the content of your web presence and content is really the starting point for the whole process and the motivation for the effort. It's also the part of the process that I know nothing about - except for my own work. So everything I write about is really peripheral to the process and a means to an end. My aim with this blog is to be neutral about the content of your web presence but I don't want to leave the impression that it isn't important. It's vital.

Your success in this field is limited only by the quality of the content you provide.

LinkWithin

2010-03-04T20:23:00.005-05:00

Every post on this blog now has three links to other posts at the bottom. This is due to a service called LinkWithin that I recently added to the blog. This free service uses a widget to find and display related posts and give readers another way to navigate the blog.

I've also added a Flickr box to the right hand column so that you can see some of my pictures.

Test from Andala

2010-03-03T09:31:00.002-05:00

This post was created at Andala Café in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at OpenCoffee to show how easy it is to blog from an iPhone.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod.

BlogPress is an iPhone app - there's a free "lite" version and a paid version - that lets you create blog posts from anywhere and include pictures that you've just taken. This is an incredibly useful thing for, say, a real estate agent who wants to be up to the minute with listings.

Step by Step Guide to a Robust Profile - Foundations

2010-03-01T08:33:00.009-05:00

Yesterday's post started to cover the foundation of your internet profile: your verifiable physical identity.
This is the necessary starting point or anchor for your personal or business brand. It allows everything else you do on the internet to be traced back to a single source and it also makes it possible for anyone to verify whether or not something with your name on it was in fact created by you. It works like a fingerprint.
Some readers may wonder about privacy. Does this approach leave you vulnerable to identity theft or impersonation? It might - if you include your full address or social security number on your profile. But I think it does more to protect your identity because it raises your visibility. It's much harder to (successfully) impersonate a famous person. If you really don't want to be famous then you might want to take a different approach.

The next step is to make sure you have consistent, linked profiles on all the major sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, etc. The list of "major" sites extends to anything in common use by members of your profession. For me, that's the ACM, SourceForge, Slashdot, TED, etc. The more of these you have, the better - I find new ones every day - but more important than how many you have is how you connect them. Many site profiles allow you to include links to your own web site, your Twitter feed, etc. These links are essential. Fill them in consistently across many sites and you'll have many links back to your own site. You can also find ways to cross-link profiles. All the big sites let you include many links in your profile and this gives you a chance to build up the matrix.

Social Network Strategy

2010-02-28T21:29:00.011-05:00

Many of the posts on this blog offer tactical recommendations for your social network profile. This article will show you how these ideas come together in a plan to build an on-line brand with a solid foundation.

To do this, we start with the core of your internet identity and work our way out.

OpenID
Name and Domain
Social network sites
Blog
Comments

There's also a "step zero" that you've very likely already taken - and it needs to be explained.

The most fundamental piece of your internet identity is you - your physical existence. Everything else depends on this. The best evidence for a real person behind a network of profiles is a physical location and the best way to establish this in internet terms is with an ISP - your local internet service provider.

This is how you create a solid base for your identity. Your ISP gives you a physical connection to the internet and an email address that can be verified. By this definition, AOL does not qualify as an ISP while Comcast and Verizon do make the grade. The difference is that anyone can call in to AOL and they have no means to verify the source of the call. Comcast, Verizon, and may other ISPs have a physical line to your home or business. This means that your internet activity can be traced back to your location and probably your bank account. If that's not what you want, then you're reading the wrong blog.

(It's also clear that email addresses from Yahoo, Hotmail, and even Gmail do not work at this basic level. Those email addresses can be created from anywhere.)

From the core email address, the next level out is the OpenID or another equivalent centralized identity provider. My earlier post about OpenID explains how to get one and how it works.

OpenID also works well in conjunction with a domain. You can put a link to your OpenID account on the home page of your web site to link them.

Once you have that OpenID account, you can use it to sign in to many internet sites. I recommend that you use it whenever you can because all the posts and comments you create on those sites will be tied together by the OpenID and the name you put on the OpenID account.
The OpenID account page is also a convenient profile page where you can put your picture, your web site URL, and some personal information. You may want to put your location - city and state - and some professional details there.

Your Name and Your Domain

2010-02-27T22:26:00.010-05:00

When you have decided to get a domain for your personal brand you face the problem of what name to use. I wrestled with this for a long time ten years ago when I bought my first domain, trovar.com. When I bought my second domain last month, the choice took no time at all. That's because I knew I wanted PaulGeffen.com - which I hadn't taken the first time around because I didn't think I was building a personal brand at the time.

You may find it very easy to pick your domain, or find it difficult. Here are some points to consider:

Is your name a common one?
Is your name long, hard to spell, hard to remember, or hard to pronounce?
Do you already have a brand distinct from your name?

You probably know the answer to the first question, but it is still worthwhile to check Google to see if the search results agree with you. Many people have names that are unusual and also ambiguous in the search results. If you have a common name or one that is also in use by someone else then you have two challenges: the domain you want is probably already taken and Google search won't help people find you. Creative effort is required at this point.

Names in the second category are not the best candidates for domains. You may be better off with a shortened or phonetic version of the name - if it's available and unambiguous. In general it's best to keep domain names as short and simple as possible without giving up clarity.

If you currently do business under a brand name or trademark then you can try to use that if it's available. Again, check Google. Some business names are ambiguous across the search results unless you use the name of a city, for example, to refine the search.

Here is a general observation on the process of choosing a name. Before the twentieth century, most businesses used the name of the owner for identification. Corporate brands were the exception. With the rise of print and electronic media - and modern marketing - most businesses chose to use descriptive or abstract names and logos.

Now we see a resurgence in the older style of naming as fewer people are employed by traditional businesses and more people set out on solo careers. The rise of social network web sites also encourages this trend - very few people use a brand name or pseudonym on Facebook.

Your Natural Domain

2010-02-26T11:14:00.011-05:00

A friend of a friend recently wrote:

"When I search for myself on Google the first thing that comes up is my NYTimes wedding announcement - I divorced #1 husband in 1991. How do I get this off Google?"

The short answer is - you probably can't. Google has its own arcane rules for what it shows.
The longer - and better - answer is that you can easily promote pages that you control above this article in the Google rankings. The first step is to get a domain. If your name is not already taken - and many common names are - then reserve it. Go to Whois.net and check for yourname.com, or .net, or any other top-level domain.
Most people will find that their names are not yet taken. I waited until last month to get PaulGeffen.com - and the .net and .org versions are still unused, as is paul-geffen.com. Not everyone can get the domain they prefer, especially if you have a common name, but Whois will let you know about variations that are available.
Domain registration takes a few minutes and costs a few dollars per year at reputable places like 1and1.com, or not-so-nice places like GoDaddy.com. I've used both - for different reasons. You can reserve a .com for less than $7/year. This doesn't include hosting, which is the next step.

Now that you have the domain, you need to do two things:

add content
link to it

You only need one page on the domain. Content needs to be about you, of course, and must include links to all your other profiles. The more profiles you have, the better. There are thousands of sites that will let you create a profile of one kind or another. The bigger social networking sites are a good place to start but this is something that I continue to work on every day - you want to sign up on as many sites as you can.
When you sign up for an account on a new site, you may get a chance to provide a link to your home page. This is essential - reciprocal links between your domain and well-known domains are the whole point of this exercise.

The next steps, after the domain and the links to the domain, are to add content to the sites where you've created accounts. Every time you do this, you add to the pile of information that Google sees is linked to your name. The aggregation of these bits and pieces across many sites is what Google likes to do - that is what the search results contain. The result is a mosaic picture of you. The thing to remember is that you create the pieces and put them out there for the search engine to find. You can make sure that all the pieces fit together into a coherent picture. It's a long process - don't try to rush it - but you are very much in control.

Aggregator

2010-02-25T19:19:00.004-05:00

I can probably find two or three new sites like this every day - this one came in via a Twitter link:

Wakooz is an aggregator, a noisier version of iGoogle, less elegant than Feedly. Don't go there if you don't like an orange and brown color scheme. (What are they thinking??)

I did find one use for it right away: I can now Tweet in Dutch. And I will!

Juggling

2010-02-25T15:06:00.005-05:00

I wrote a while ago about my multiple Twitter accounts. Now I want to write about my many blogs. (One is not enough.)
I started a new blog in December to give me a place to write about Software Development Life Cycle. That blog isn't as active as this one and I don't promote it as much. It's also much more a work in progress because it attempts to cover the topic in a reasonably comprehensive way and I haven't filled in a lot of the details. So what you see there now is a useful outline but not a complete presentation.
Earlier this week I created a Facebook page for Social Network Tactics and I consider that a blog as well. I try to add something every day, along the same lines as this blog.
I started a new blog on Boston.com last weekend. That was an experiment and I haven't done much with it. Maybe I'll write about the weather.

Speaking of weather - it's awful outside!

Empire Avenue

2010-02-24T14:57:00.003-05:00

Empire Avenue, as promised, sent me an invitation to join their site. It is, as they said, a marketplace where members buy and sell shares. We start with a fixed amount of cash and add to the cash by doing things like connecting the Empire account to a Twitter or Facebook account, or to an RSS feed. Those actions fill out a personal profile that helps establish the "social" part of the site.
The rest of the action is around buying and selling shares. The shares are tied to member accounts, which can be personal or business. I have a personal account and I have not seen any business accounts. Most of the accounts are located in Edmonton, Canada, and appear to belong to employees, friends, and family of the company that has developed the site.
The site sends a lot of email notifications - which I think can be turned off.

(The next day) I went to the site and tried to turn off email notifications. It wasn't easy. I wrote an email bug report to explain the problem and got an immediate reply from Empire - they agreed with me and promised to fix it. (The site needs a single-click way to turn off all email notification. Instead, it took over thirty clicks to stop all types of email from the site.)

Scorecard

2010-02-23T21:22:00.006-05:00

We've seen evidence of the recent proliferation of social network sites. I found a list of 145 and someone replied with a comment that pointed to a list more than twice that long. I'm not sure it would be productive to examine every site on these lists - but how do I know I haven't overlooked something useful? My librarian's instincts for classification tell me to at least try to group the sites and make a few short lists of the most valuable ones.

Two new sites came to my attention today. Both are in beta now but will be public soon.

Quora
"A continually improving collection of questions and answers"
You can visit the About page and see what this site proposes to do. It looks like a cross between Aardvark (helping people to answer questions) and a Wiki where the answers are classified. So far most of the questions are about social networking. The site is technically very slick and it looks very nice. The most famous person behind the site is Kevin Der, an MIT grad who creates crossword puzzles for the New York Times.

I have an account on this site. It reminds me of the very early Wikipedia, except that it isn't organized into pages or articles.

Empire Avenue
"The People's Market"
The concept is to create a way to invest in and trade shares related to the value of people and brands. Really.
Details are not provided and the site is still in closed beta (like Quora) but I have asked them for an account and I will report on it when I know more.

Work life balance

2010-02-23T10:28:00.005-05:00

"Most people struggle with life balance simply because they haven’t paid the price to decide what is really important to them." - Stephen Covey

What price is that? Is this anything new?

Alexander Pope said that "the proper study of mankind is man."

"Know thyself" was the guiding motto of the Greek philosophers. This is something that each of us must rediscover: the huge difference between getting what you want and knowing who you are.

This is fundamentally an either/or proposition. What you want and who you are - not only are these different but they can be diametrically opposed. Real education happens when we don't get what we want.

Apologies for the laundry lists

2010-02-22T18:36:00.006-05:00

The last two posts were little more than lists, and I know that's not very helpful or much fun to read. I will go back and update those posts with comments and links in the next few days.
These posts are also checklists for me (and possibly for you as well) to remind me that there are many sites I haven't visited yet. I'm still debating whether to try to write up all of them on this blog. Any thoughts on that? Would you find the survey useful?

Here's a sample:

backtype
I don't know much about this site, and I have signed up and tried it. It has a search function and asks me to tell it what my accounts are on other sites like Digg, Friend Feed, and Posterous. It may be some kind of aggregator that doesn't mind aggregating other aggregators.

Etsy

"Buy and sell handmade or vintage items, art and supplies on Etsy, the world's most vibrant handmade marketplace."

EAVB_UAXSXGHLSC

Another name check - you've only seen the half of it!

2010-02-22T17:12:00.005-05:00

Yesterday's post had a list of 72 social networking sites listed by namechk.com - and that's only the first half of the list.
The rest of the sites are here:

12seconds.tv
aNobii
AudioBoo
authorSTREAM
Aviary
Bambuser
behance.net
BlinkList
Blip.fm
blippr
Blogmarks
brightkite
chimp
claimid
ColourLovers
Corkd
Cyworld
Dropjack
Ecadamy
Elgg.org
Faves
FFFFound!
Fotolog
foursquare (a)
fwisp
Gnolia
GRAZEit
Hexday
Howcast
ibibo
identica
iliketotallyloveit
InsaneJournal
Jaiku (b)
Jamendo
kwippy
Odeo
PHREADZ
Picasa (a)
Plurk
politics4all
Propellor
Qik
Rate Your Music (a)
Rebja
ryze
SlideSix
SocialShake
SoundCloud
Soup.io
Steam
tipd
Utterli
vi.sualize.us
Wakoopa
WUAH
XFire
Yotify
YouAre
zeaLOG
Zoomr

for a total of 145 sites. Not sure why Foursquare and Picasa are on the "second" list.

Name check - how many sites do I need to worry about?

2010-02-21T18:36:00.007-05:00

Have you seen all of these sites? http://namechk.com/

How many have you even heard of?
I count 72 sites listed by namechk. Many of them are new to me, so let's go down the list and try to make some sense of it.

BackType (ab)
BallHype
bebo (b)
blip.tv
Blogger (a)
Buzznet
cafemom
Current
DailyMotion
delicious (b)
deviantART (a)
Digg (c)
Disqus
eBay (b)
eHow
epinions (b)
eSnips
Etsy
Facebook (a)
Families.com
Fanpop
Flickr (a)
Flixster
FriendFeed (a)
funnyordie
Gather (c)
Good Reads
Google (a)
hi5
Hulu (b)
iLike
ImageShack
Instructables
Kaboodle
Kongregate
last.fm (a)
LinkedIn (a)
LiveJournal (b)
Livevideo
Mahalo
mixx (a)
Multiply (b)
myLot
MySpace (b)
Netlog
netvibes
newsvine
ning (b)
photobucket
PictureTrail
Posterous (a)
reddit (c)
ResumeBucket
Revver
Slashdot (a)
Slide
Snooth
Squidoo
StumbleUpon (c)
Technorati (b)
ThisNext
Tribe
tumblr (c)
twitter (a)
UStream
Viddler
Vimeo (a)
Vox
wikipedia (a)
Wordpress (b)
Xanga (b)
YouTube (a)

That's the list as of 21 February. I can think of sites that aren't listed: Rate Your Music and Plaxo are the first ones I'd add. Also Naymz and Ping.fm, feedly, Foursquare, Meetup, Xing, &c.

I've annotated the list as follows:

(a) I use this site. (15 sites)

(ab) I have joined this site, but only to learn more about it.
(b) I know something about this site. (12 sites)
(c) I've heard of it but I can only guess what it does. (5 sites)

The other 40 sites are a mystery to me.

New blog at Boston.com

2010-02-21T08:49:00.004-05:00

Boston.com will host a blog for anyone who is registered with the site. Here's my blog.
Thanks to Steve Garfield for leading the way.

Another new feature of my web presence today is Mippin. Mippin is a free service that takes an RSS feed or blog URL and creates a mobile version of the blog. Here's mine.

Five Second Test

2010-02-20T20:43:00.003-05:00

My web site has a new look and some of the details are due to feedback from a new service called fivesecondtest.

Fivesecondtest takes one image - it could be a logo or a web page - and shows it to site visitors for five seconds. The site has two types of test: Click and Memory. The Click Test asks visitors to click on "areas that stand out" and then asks them to describe what they clicked on. The Memory Test shows the image for five seconds and then asks the visitor to type in five things they remember.

I took a screen shot of my site home page and did both tests. The Click Test showed where visitors clicked on the page. The most popular place to click was on my name, which wasn't a link at first. The test results told me to make it a link.

The Memory Test showed that people remembered my name, the calendar, colors, and the social network logo buttons. The responses were consistent and I take that to mean that the page isn't too complicated.

Appearances on other blogs

2010-02-18T15:35:00.004-05:00

My first guest blog post was published today, and I get a mention in Top 10 Twitter Personality Types at Q Web Consulting.
Last week, Leanne Chase at Career Life Connection asked me to write a post for her blog - my first invitation. I put a couple of sketches on my blog last week and today the final post appears here as Two-track life.
Thanks to Leanne and to Michelle Quillin of New England Multimedia for giving me the opportunity to contribute.

Practice, practice, practice

2010-02-17T22:57:00.003-05:00

This is central to my approach to self-marketing and building a personal brand: blog every day.
It takes discipline and determination, and this is the key to success. It isn't always easy but it is always worthwhile. I don't always know what to write about and sometimes I don't find out what it is until I start, but there is always something.
There is a huge reward that awaits anyone who keeps up the daily routine for long enough. For the writer, it is the fact that writing is now part of normal self-expression and not a chore. There is always something to write about, even if it is only the experience of writing.
Then there are the experiences of life in addition to that and, after a while, there is no real difference, no distinction. Life becomes part of the practice.

Photos in Google Buzz

2010-02-16T21:30:00.001-05:00

It's easy to add a photo to a Buzz post - if the photo is stored on Picasa. Otherwise Google will upload the picture to Picasa for you. It's the same thing with Blogger. The pictures in my blog posts are also on Picasa.
Note that you cannot add another photo to the Buzz post after it's been posted. Edit mode lets you delete the photo, but not add another one.

New web site home page design

2010-02-16T18:33:00.004-05:00

Hinted at by the Valentine's Day graphic below.
See http://paulgeffen.com or http://trovar.com for the new look.
And tell me what you think, OK?

Instant Market Karma

2010-02-15T21:49:00.008-05:00

The Boston Wagner Society is in the middle of its first ad campaign.

For the first six and a half years we relied almost exclusively on word of mouth for new members. We set up a Facebook page last year and had nineteen Fans a week ago. Last Friday we decided to use a Facebook Ad to get new Fans. This is the simplest form of Facebook advertising - we just created some text and set a budget and Facebook does the rest.

The results have been good. Facebook reports that our ad has been shown over eighty thousand times in four days. We limited our audience to adults within fifty miles of Boston who have Opera or Richard Wagner listed as interests. That gives us 20,000 impressions per day.

Of these views, one tenth of one percent generate a click on the ad. We've had eighty (80) clicks so far. We also have forty-six new Facebook Fans so our conversion rate is about 60% - which is very good.

All of this costs us less than fifty cents per click, or less than a dollar for each new Facebook Fan. The campaign runs until the end of the week and at this rate we will have about a hundred fans, all in the Boston area, when we're done.

We have a concert coming up in May. This fan base will be our natural market. These Facebook members have signed up to get announcements of our events.

The Wagner Society has about 125 paid members, and about 100 members in the Boston area. Our goal is for the May concert to be sold out - about 300 people. We have bought radio ads on WHRB - the first of which aired last night - and will buy print ads in the Boston Globe and possibly other local papers.

Facebook is now central to our marketing strategy.

Risking Information Overload

2010-02-14T15:25:00.012-05:00

Today I counted the incoming streams that I watch via the internet.

Four email addresses: Comcast, Gmail, Yahoo, and trovar.com
Four Twitter feeds: LPGeffen, PaulGeffen, BostonWagner, and SviatoslavR
Two Facebook pages: Paul Geffen and the Boston Wagner Society
multiple Yahoo! Groups
LinkedIn updates
Google Buzz
Google Wave
Blogs I follow
RateYourMusic.com

and I wonder what's next?
Not long ago, I had time to read Slashdot. No more.

The streams listed above aren't just for information. Most of this is for business.
I'm the Marketing Director for the Boston Wagner Society and we have a Facebook ad campaign running to build our visibility and contact lists. My goals are to double the paid membership (from 125 to 250) by the end of 2010, and to sell out our May 21st concert at the Longy School (300 people). It won't be easy.

Private messages in Google Buzz

2010-02-14T09:09:00.003-05:00

Messages (and many other things) in Google Buzz are public by default.
The steps required to create and send a private message are as follows.

First, you need to create an empty group. This is a little harder than it needs to be, but these steps work today:

Create a new message in Buzz.
Before you post it, select the Private option from the drop down list next to "Post".
Click on "post to other groups".
At the bottom of the list of groups, click on "Create a new group".
Name the new group something like "Empty group" and select one member - doesn't matter who.
Click "Done" to save the group,
Click "Edit" next to the group name,
Remove the member from the group and save it.

You now have an empty group, which you will need to create a private message.

You are also in the middle of editing a message. Give it some content and Post it. If the content starts with an @-sign and the email address of someone on Google, that person will be able to see the message. If it doesn't, no one else will see the message.

The next time you create a post in Buzz, note that the post will be Private by default. You may want to change this to Public. Buzz remembers your last choice and makes it the default for your next post. It also remembers that you picked the Empty group for your last private post and makes that the default.

Google acquires Aardvark

2010-02-12T20:07:00.006-05:00

In the news today: Google buys Aardvark.

What's Aardvark? And why does Google want them?

The Aardvark side of the story is here: http://blog.vark.com/?p=361

Aardvark is a neat idea and a great example of social engineering. They are an on-line real-time broker for information. When you sign up for Aardvark, you give them keywords that describe topics that you know well and about which you can answer questions. Users of Aardvark ask questions via IM or email and Aardvark decides where to forward the questions.

As a member, I get the occasional Google Chat request from Aardvark. It's always very polite. "Do you have a second to answer a question about Google Wave?" If I reply then I get a question from another Aardvark member. I answer over the chat channel. Follow-ups are supported. Aardvark always thanks me for helping. This is one smart robot. All the subject matter expertise is provided by other people, but the site is smart about how it handles its interaction with the experts.

Read more about the Magic of Aardvark by Rob Go.

Following 850 on Twitter

2010-02-12T14:37:00.003-05:00

Crazy thought, isn't it? It's true - that's how many accounts I follow now.
How can I possibly keep up with that many people? There aren't enough hours in the day to read the posts. Frankly, I don't even try. There are times when the sheer volume ensures that there is always something to read, even in the middle of the night. As a result I can usually find something worthwhile to retweet with a few minutes - I love to share, and I follow diverse sources from the art and design worlds as well as technology and marketing. I'm a well-rounded bird.

My approach to Twitter is like my way of life in general. I'm a collector, an intellectual and cultural omnivore, and an auto-didact. Twitter is a little bit of heaven on earth for me.

Work Bar Boston

2010-02-12T14:13:00.003-05:00

Today is Free Day at Work Bar Boston and I drove to South Station to see what that's about.
I brought three machines - all with batteries - and here I am, connected to the free WiFi for a few hours. (When it's not free, Work Bar is $20/day or $250/month and it's very close to public transportation.)
This is a quiet environment even though nearly all the seats are filled. Work Bar is similar to a health club. Everyone is here to work. Everyone has a desk. There are conference and meeting rooms available. If I didn't have a quiet space at home, this would be a good place to work.

Yesterday I met with a fellow blogger - Liz Kelleher - and we talked about what we're doing (separately) to create and maintain a web presence and personal brand. Liz has professional experience with web publishing, which I don't, and she's a writer. I asked her to review and critique my web profile and she gave me lots of great advice. Some of the results of that discussion will appear on my web site in the near future.
I was able to give Liz some advice as well. Here is a summary:

Get a domain that is the same as your name. (I did this with PaulGeffen.com recently.)
Design a new home page for the new domain. (This is near the top of my own to-do list.)
Start a new blog for the purpose of writing about the process of building a brand. Write every day.

The last point is an example of "follow me" because that's pretty much what I've been doing here for the last two months. I didn't start a new blog for this - you can find my "legacy" posts if you go back far enough - but this blog is certainly the self-referential journal that I recommend to anyone who wants to try this. You may not get a big following - I don't have one - but there is great benefit to keeping a public journal like this one. When you know that anyone might read it, your writing is more honest because you may have to defend it.

Which brings me to something that I need to correct.

I wrote recently about my multiple Twitter accounts. I created a protected account and expected that my follower and following lists were protected as well as my posts. It turns out that's not the case. Anyone can see the follower and following list for a protected Twitter account. So much for trying to keep my personal contact list private! It's unfortunate because I don't send much out from that account. The tweets aren't what I'd hoped to protect.

More Google Buzz

2010-02-11T19:14:00.005-05:00

Google Buzz - day two - we find the dark side.

On of the first things to do on Buzz is to find friends. By default, Buzz publishes the lists of people you follow, and who follow you - at least those who have public profiles. You can control this from your Google Profile page. For now, let's see what happens when the default setting prevails.

On your Gmail page, you'll see Buzz under Inbox on the left. Click on Buzz to go to the new interface. You will find two useful links: "## followers" and "Following ## people".

Click on these to see your follower and following lists. You can choose to follow any of the people who follow you. You can also block anyone who is following you. So far, so good. Now click on the name of one of your followers. That will bring you to a page that shows that person's Buzz stream.

That page may have links that let you see how many people are following that person, and how many that person follows. If it does, that person has left as checked the Profile control marked "Display the list of people I'm following and people following me."

If you find these links then you can immediately see another list of people - some of whom you don't know and who don't know you - and visit their public profiles. Some Google Buzz users don't mind publishing this information and you are likely to find at least one of your contacts who publishes contact lists this way.

This happens all the time on Twitter. You can see the following/follower lists of other users and I find it's a useful way to build my list of people to follow. The list of people that I follow is something I know that I publish on my public Twitter account. That, by the way, is why I have a second Twitter account that's protected. You can't see the list of who I follow there unless you are on the list yourself. And I only put people I know on the list.

Google Buzz is live!

2010-02-10T19:39:00.009-05:00

Google Buzz was announced and released yesterday. I didn't see it on my Gmail account until some time today and now I'm on the learning curve. I follow eighteen people and have six followers (sounds like Twitter, doesn't it?) and Google started me off with a few of each.

I like Google Buzz so far. It has some of the good qualities of Google Wave. For example, you can edit comments after you've sent them. And comments show up in the right place - under the parent post. I have added my Twitter feed to my Buzz stream. I don't know if anyone else can see it, but I can see my own tweets.

Not so good is the fact that I don't see a way to add Buzz users from my Gmail contact list. If I explicitly add people, it works. But why can't Buzz give me a list of my contacts who are already on Buzz?

Like Twitter, I can see who is on the "follower" and "following" lists of some of the people I follow. Unlike Twitter, I can only see the people who have public profiles on Google. (I don't know why I can see the follower/following lists of only some of my Buzz contacts.)

p.s. After a few hours I have eleven followers and I follow 35 people. It's easy to find people by following friends of friends.

Another round with Wikipedia

2010-02-09T16:56:00.006-05:00

At a recent lecture, someone mentioned that she had seen an article about herself on Wikipedia. That's a nice bit of "cred" - if you can get it. She brought it up on the screen and we saw a big "speedy delete" notice at the top of the page. Bad news. The article itself was fine - well sourced and unbiased - but someone had tagged it as "autobiographical and spam."
It turns out that the article had been created by a colleague of the subject and that the subject herself had edited it. I did a little research and found that she had very little history on Wikipedia.
This explains why an editor might object to the article. Wikipedia doesn't like it when people promote themselves or when they edit articles about themselves. This policy is taken very seriously - and I hate to think what Wikipedia would look like if it were not.
My response to the situation, as an editor at Wikipedia, was to take down the template with a comment that said "I object to the proposed deletion." The template says explicitly that any editor can take down the notice for any reason. After that, another editor visited the page and supported my decision. (Whew!)
My advice to the subject of the article was as follows:

Create a nice user page for yourself. That shows the rest of the community that you're not just trying to use an article about yourself to promote yourself.
Thank the editors who helped you. Leave nice comments on their talk pages.
Go back to Wikipedia and contribute. Edit articles where you have expertise. Create new articles. Participate in discussions on talk pages.

Wikipaedia can be intimidating and even hostile if you don't know the culture. I've seen some very smart people get hit there, give up in disgust, and never go back. It doesn't have to be that way.

Poles apart

2010-02-08T23:02:00.004-05:00

Tonight I went to a Meetup group for Boston MySQL Users. Tomorrow morning, I meet with Boston Solo PR Practitioners. What do these have in common?

The description for tomorrow's meeting reads in part:

"Many solo PR people used to be with firms where we had a community of co-workers who acted as our editors, brainstorming partners and support groups. Now, as solos, we don't have that ..."

It's all about community, and what went missing when we found ourselves alone. The same turmoil that has caught me and many of my engineering colleagues has swept other fields as well. We all need a community to support our practice. The work environment can provide that and I'm happy for those who were able to find new positions and reconnect in that way. As I continue along the path to more independent and self-directed work, I find community wherever I can. And there are many opportunities around me.

Two-track mind

2010-02-07T17:34:00.007-05:00

I've always had two careers, more or less on parallel tracks.
The first is music. For as long as I can remember - at least since the age of five - I've been fascinated by all kinds of musical sound. My record collection is huge - about 10,000 items (you can see it here) - and covers almost everything from ethnic and traditional through the main stream of Western art music to experimental and popular. I like to think that I have a library that would let me run a 24/7 music service. It would take about two years to play through all of it with no repetition.
The second career is engineering. I have worked in software development since 1970, most of the time at large companies that produced enterprise software products. This field has a lot of turnover. People generally don't stay with one job or one company for more that a few years. I'm the exception in that I worked for only two companies for twenty-five years: Lotus and IBM Rational. In those years I had many jobs in many groups, on many projects for many managers. But I largely missed the need or the desire to find a new position at a new company for most of that time.

Not let a day go by

2010-02-06T23:19:00.002-05:00

... without some kind of blog post. This is important.
Yesterday I wrote about something that I plan to write for another site. Today I did a draft of an essay on work/life balance and the results were not good. One sure-fire way to produce bad writing is to over-think and over-analyze the topic. My blog posts are generally easy to write because they are based in what I feel about what I've recently done. When I go to a networking event, I'm excited about all the new possibilities and that excitement lasts long enough to inform my writing.
This new assignment is different. The problem of work/life balance is one that I've thought about and dealt with for many years, as have most professionals, and I have mixed feelings about it. I don't know that I've solved it. I look back and have some regrets. So this is hard to write about because there is just too much to say.

Work on a blog post for Career Life Connection

2010-02-05T20:19:00.007-05:00

I have been invited to write a "guest" post for another site. The site is Career Life Connection and the topic is work/life balance.
The site was created by Leanne Chase and it is "a place for employers and employees to discuss the subject of flexibility in the workplace." The audience is "educated, experienced professionals." I certainly qualify - in fact I'd like to think that I am right in the middle of the audience they aim for.
You can learn about my education and experience from my LinkedIn profile but that won't tell you about my approach to work/life balance. My blog post for CLC will go into this in more depth - I intend to spend the time to write a thousand words, which is more than I will do here - but here's a sketch.

Work is an essential part of adult life. I don't believe it can be the exclusive focus of a healthy approach to living. Many professionals are able to find personal gratification in their work - they are the lucky ones. For most of the world, work is a means to survival, a sacrifice, not a source of satisfaction.
For the first-world professional, work itself can seem to provide almost every reward needed for a complete life style. Our system of education teaches us to concentrate on a career, not to build a life. Our culture provides entertainment and other distractions but few clues about how to really live. It is up to each of us to figure this out for ourselves.
Work is one of three essential ways that we gain support for our survival. The other two are spirit and community. "Spirit" refers to the ideals of art, philosophy, or religion that guide us to make good choices. "Community" is caring about the people around us and sharing what we have. The world of work is pragmatic. It does not always teach us what is right, only what is necessary. It is essentially competitive and forces us to look out for ourselves and our team at the expense of others.

The Big Five

2010-02-04T12:08:00.007-05:00

As I start to work as a coach for mid-career professionals I find that many of them do not use all five of the major social network tools or do not use them to best effect.
To recap from yesterday, here are the five:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
Blogs
Meetup

and here is an explanation of how you need to use all five.

1. Facebook
This is (currently) the largest social network site and the one with the most customization. You can set this up to your taste. It is primarily for personal and family contacts. Contacts are symmetrical - you and your friends must agree to be connected. Facebook runs ads and lets you opt in to groups that post news on your wall. Consider what business or professional groups you can join on Facebook to provide a stream of information that you can use to stay current in your field.

2. LinkedIn
This is the largest business network. Contact relationships are symmetrical as in Facebook. Opinions vary about how much overlap to have between personal and business contacts. It's helpful to have different sites for the two functions. Membership in LinkedIn is pretty much essential for professionals, whether employed or not, who use the internet for work.
Consider how to decide what invitations to accept. LinkedIn asks you to accept only from "people you know well" but that is open to interpretation. A great way to use LinkedIn in the job search is to find second-level contacts at companies that you want to work for. You may not know anyone at the company but it's more likely that you will know someone who knows someone. The more contacts you have, the better your chances.
Don't be offended when someone refuses to accept a contact because they don't know you well enough. Not everyone needs LinkedIn and not everyone uses it in the same way.

3. Twitter
This is the fastest-growing network site and a valuable source of up-to-the-minute information. Contacts here are not symmetrical and the rules for who you follow are different from Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts. The key to Twitter for professionals is to build up a list of high quality sources. These are the people you follow. To start, you can look for fellow professionals and follow them. Then see who they follow and follow those people too. Another way to find good people to follow is to watch the re-tweets in your stream. If you like the content, you can follow the author directly and also look at who they follow.

4. Blogs
Everyone professional needs at least one blog, unless you work for a government agency that forbids it. Many professionals know how to write for publication, but most employees do not own the rights to what they write for employers. Blog is a form of publication that you need to master. The topic is up to you. The blog host is also up to you. Some people have web sites that are essentially blogs - not commercial. (I have a web site plus two blogs.)
Blogs are the most free-form of these media. Unlike Twitter, you can go back and edit your posts. You have a lot of control over format and layout and you can make it stand out from the crowd with good visual design. A blog is like publishing your own magazine. It's good to have a topic and keep close to it. If you enable comments on the blog then you can have conversations with your readers. If you moderate the comments then you will have a lot more control over the conversations.

5. Meetup
The first four networks are purely virtual. Meetup is different. It is for events in the "real" world. It is about in-person networking. This is essential for every professional. Meetup is free and open to the public. It is easy to find affinity groups and job opportunities here.

There are alternatives to these sites. MySpace, Naymz, Xing, and Plancast offer similar services. I urge you to explore those in addition to the core networks listed above and to find other sites that help you to get your message out.

Once you have your profiles set up on these sites, it is important to link them together. You can do this by using a consistent form of your name everywhere and, if possible, the same picture of yourself on every site. You can also create links from one site to another. LinkedIn lets you put a link to your Twitter account on your profile. You can put links to your blog or website on your Facebook profile. Etc.

Three events today

2010-02-03T22:29:00.005-05:00

I haven't reported on my networking events recently. Today had three of them:

8:30 AM - OpenCoffee
10:00 AM - Job Search Support Network (Meetup with Marilyn Santiesteban - @LayoffLady)
6:00 PM - Princeton Entrepreneurs (Talk by Frank Moss of MIT Media Lab)

I met at least fifteen new people and invited them to connect on LinkedIn. Most of the people I met are already on Twitter but the rest were urged to join. (Especially those looking for work.)

The Job Search group gave me a chance to get up in front of an audience and explain the Big Five of social networks:

Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
Blogs
Meetup

and why they are so important. Many professionals in the job market today continue to use 20th-century tactics to look for work: résumé, recruiter, and job boards. That is not enough these days. It's necessary to market yourself and create a personal brand. It's not hard to learn or to do. It's a natural extension of the networking skills most of us already have, extended to a broadcast medium called the internet.
In this context, I'm a career coach. In the Entrepreneurs' world I'm a management consultant. Tomorrow I'll be the Marketing Director for a non-profit - The Boston Wagner Society.
So many hats.