Tag Archives: LinkedIn

My social media world

Posted on May 18, 2009 | Leave a comment

This past weekend I joined Facebook, and now my social media world is so complex and intertwined that it makes my head hurt. To help me make sense of it all, I drew this map:

My social media map

My social media map

(I used bubbl.us, which is a really intuitive, easy-to-use, free mind-mapping tool.)

This doesn’t show all my social media sites, just the ones I use most regularly. But it did help me organize my social media efforts, at least in my own head. The black lines show everything that feeds into FriendFeed, which is my nexus and the most complete view of what I’m doing online. The gray lines show which services are being automagically updated by which other services, usually via an RSS feed or FriendFeed’s automatic output to Twitter.

I organized my social media universe into four quadrants. My home quadrant (tan) — my blogs but also my Google Profile – are my home bases on the Web and also where the world finds me. My networks quadrant (green) have organized quite naturally into a professional network that I use only occasionally (LinkedIn), a network of friends and family I know in real life (Facebook) and an online network with many overlaps with the other two networks that I use most frequently and is the largest (Twitter).

My links quadrant (purple) are my tools for collecting and sharing links. I read blog posts and other articles via RSS feed in Google Reader every day, and share interesting finds out to my network. Delicious is where I permanently store links and do research. StumbleUpon is more of a historical record of links I’ve blogged about, plus a lot of random fun stuff I discover while surfing the web.

Finally, there are miscellaneous tools that reflect my hobbies in the pink quadrant. I’m an avid reader, so I have several tools for organizing and recording my reading and books (LibraryThing, Lists of Bests, All Consuming), which feed back to my books blog and sometimes Twitter. I also use tools to track my goals (43 Things) and travel (43 Places), and to upload my photos (Flickr).

Of course, not everything is on here. I didn’t include really miscellaneous places like my Amazon Wishlist or Bookmooch, or places I rarely visit like Digg or Technorati. But it is nice being able to visualize my little online universe and my place within it.

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Google makes ego-searching even easier with Google Profiles

Posted on April 22, 2009 | 1 Comment
Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Google quietly introduced a new feature yesterday. If you have a Google Profile — which you probably do, if you use one of Google’s free services — you can now set it to turn up in Google searches for your name. To get started, search Google for the word me and scroll to the bottom of the page. If you’re like me, you’ll see your photo (maybe) and a link to your profile. Click the link to edit your profile. If your profile doesn’t show up, I believe you can click this link to edit it, or go to My Account in Google and look for the link to Edit Profile.

You have to opt in to get your profile to show up in Google searches by entering your full name into your profile. You can also make your profile more visible in search results by linking to it, such as from your blog.

Now that everybody Googles everybody else before hiring them, admitting them to college or dating them, Google Profiles promise to make the process a little more controllable. At least there is now one place on the search results for your name where you can direct searchers to the information about you that you want them to see. For instance, you can add links to your social networking stuff, such as to your blogs, Twitter page or LinkedIn page, on your profile. And if there are multiple people with the same name, the Profiles feature makes it a little more likely that you can find the right one.

Google is probably going to integrate Profiles with their other services, which will make them even more powerful. For instance, Gmail users can already send one another email through profiles without having to know the other person’s email address. I’m sure more integration is to come. This is probably Step #742 in Google’s master plan to take over the world, or at least, the Interwebs.

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New social media integration in popular Web 2.0 tools

Posted on November 3, 2008 | Leave a comment
Image representing Google Alerts as depicted i...

Image via CrunchBase

There has been a flurry of improvements in integrating social media tools lately, which I wanted to tell you about. I’ve tried all of these new features. They all work great and offer a lot of value to users, particularly if you use more than one Web 2.0 tool.

First, if you use Google Alerts, you’ll see that they now support RSS feeds. No more having to clutter up your email inbox with alerts. Instead, you can read them at your leisure in your favorite RSS feed reader. But the RSS feed integration also makes it possible to integrate Google alerts into any application that can read and display the feeds, such as FriendFeed or your blog. Go to the Manage Your Alerts page to switch your alerts from email to RSS.

Second, LinkedIn profiles now support a lot of Web 2.0 tools, including WordPress and SlideShare. I’ve modified my LinkedIn profile to show the latest posts from this blog, for instance. It’s very easy to do; open your profile and click Add Application. These new features give you a lot of options for showing your professional network what you’re doing and helping them learn more about you.

There were some other applications that I haven’t tried but looked to be helpful if you use LinkedIn as a platform for browsing the Web and managing your Web content. For instance, you can create a reading list via Amazon and then get recommendations on similar books based on what your colleagues are reading. You can also monitor twittering about your organization or other keywords. There’s a lot of new stuff to explore, so if you haven’t dropped by LinkedIn lately, I think it’s worth a return visit.

Finally, FriendFeed has introduced backward integration with Twitter, so you can automatically tweet items from your FriendFeed. Fortunately, you can limit it to any one or more of the services in your FriendFeed, so you can choose not to tweet every Delicious bookmark or Netflix addition. But you can tweet your new blog posts, for example, without any extra effort on your part, which is what I am now doing. See this post to learn more.

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What are blogs? And how can we use them? Resources list

Posted on December 17, 2007 | 6 Comments

This is a list of resources I have collected to supplement a presentation I’m giving at work on the subjects: what are blogs, how can our nonprofit blog effectively, and what is Web 2.0 anyway? These resources include many of the examples in the actual presentation as well as supplementary reading materials.

View the presentation

About Web 2.0

Blogging Tools

Nonprofit Blogs

Blogs About Nonprofits Using Web 2.0 Technologies

The Blogosphere (finding blogs of interest)

Into Web 2.0

  • Tumblr – microblogging site
  • Twitter – microblogging site that integrates with text messaging and instant messaging (IM)
  • del.icio.us – Tag, organize and share bookmarks
  • Stumble Upon – review and rate web content
  • Digg – read and vote on web content
  • NGO Post – read and vote on web content discussing social welfare initiatives
  • Flickr – share, view and comment on photos
  • YouTube – share, view and comment on videos
  • SlideShare – share, view and comment on presentations
  • Wikipedia – world-famous collaboratively written encyclopedia built with a wiki
  • Wikibooks – collection of collaboratively written textbooks written using wikis
  • Facebook – well-known social networking site originally focusing on college students
  • LinkedIn – professional networking site
  • Dogster – social networking site for dogs
  • Causes on Facebook – nonprofits using Facebook to promote causes and raise money
  • IntraHealth Informatics’ Flickr site – nonprofits can share interesting photos to generate interest
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I heart delicious…

Posted on May 4, 2007 | Leave a comment

Of all the multitudes of Web 2.0 tools that are popping up every day, I have found Delicious to be the most useful and the most used. The fundamental basis for its usefulness is a simple idea: one set of bookmarks, no matter how many browsers or computers you use. Adding the ability to tag, bundle and share bookmarks just augments this basic usefulness.

My husband thinks del.icio.us is an evil conspiracy to track every single place we visit on the Web for nefarious but ill-defined purposes. If that’s the case, I say, then track away! If you look down the left side of this page, you’ll see all my latest del.icio.us links. This list is a real-time glimpse into what I’m thinking, reading and writing about. I like to take a look at it from time to time to see what patterns are emerging from my own web surfing and link collecting. Ideas emerge from bringing those subconscious connections into consciousness.

Because every tagged set of links has its own RSS feed, del.icio.us just gets more useful and makes my life even easier. When I am working on a project, I can capture my research links in del.icio.us and give them all the same tag. I grab the RSS feed for that tag and plug it into a feed display on a SharePoint team site or on one of my blogs. Now I can share all my links on the project with everyone else who’s interested, without the hassle of copying and pasting URLs or making sure the links list is up-to-date. I just post a good link to del.icio.us with the appropriate tag, and it appears everywhere it needs to be. It all integrates with my regular work and research habits. That’s a fundamentally useful application.

When I am working on a complicated project, I can create tag bundles with different tags corresponding to sections of an outline or project phases or whatever. As I research over days or weeks or months, I just need to post and tag the relevant links that I find. Then, when I’m ready to start compiling my research, it’s all waiting for me, already organized and labeled. del.icio.us is also useful for creating lists of things to do, such as recipes I want to make, articles I want to read or blog about, or a wishlist of things I want to buy.

David Brewster at Management:Simple recently posted about how he can’t keep up with all that’s going on the wide world of Web 2.0. I don’t think we should even try. Sure, dip your toes in every now and then, see if something that catches your eye is actually going to help you do whatever it is you’re trying to do. And once you find something that really does work for you, stick with it. For me, it’s Delicious and WordPress and Gmail. It’s even Amazon’s Wishlist, which I use in ways Amazon probably never intended — it’s a great tool for a reader like me who wants to keep track of what I’m reading, what I’m going to read next and what I’m considering reading later. My husband gets a lot more use out of Flickr than I ever will, but he’s the one who likes to take photos. Backpack, LinkedIn, Technorati and Clipmarks haven’t proved as useful as I thought at first, but the jury’s still out. Digg, Twitter, Facebook… I cruised by and just kept going.

Sure, there’s a lot going on and more coming online every day. You’ll only burn yourself out if you try to be on top of the latest and greatest all the time. Find what’s useful, use it and stick with it. Chances are, you aren’t the only one, and those are the sites and services that will make it beyond any 2.0 “bubble burst.”

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