Some have called it “Resume 2.0.”   For others, it works as a universally accessible business card.  Whether you are looking for a job or running your own business, or simply want to control what people will see when they “Google” your name on the internet, you need LinkedIn.com. 

The whole premise works a little like the “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” game — LinkedIn helps you build a growing group of “connections” — people you know and can personally vouch for — who form the “first degree” of an enormous “network” of people consisting of the friends and colleagues of your friends and colleagues. 

Sort of like the way networking works in real life, hey?

If you don’t have a LinkedIn.com profile yet, you need to build one, and here’s why: 

1. All of LinkedIn.com’s basic features are free, and LinkedIn will even search your email address books for you to find those first contacts.  You don’t need to build your profile all at once, either, but can gradually add and learn as you go.  There are plenty of online resources about LinkedIn.com to inspire you, too.
2. The more data you have online about yourself, the more easily search engines will find you.  It is more important than ever for anyone and everyone in the working world to have an online presence, and LinkedIn is a great way to help manage yours.
3. In addition to your employment history and links to your other business or personal websites, you can add ”recommendations” to your LinkedIn profile, which you solicit from your own contacts.  This is a fantastic opportunity to create a public list of quick, mini-reference letters, and one that is entirely controlled by you: nothing goes “live” on your profile until you’ve approved it.  
4. Sharing your LinkedIn.com profile is easy, and much less obtrusive than handing out resumes or business brochures.  You can even put your LinkedIn URL on a business card… a tactful way to assure that all the professional information you may want to share is easily accessible by anyone who wants it.  LinkedIn also provides a cute little badge you can add to your other business websites, linking folk back to your profile.
5. Managing your contacts is easy, too.   Once people are on your contact list, you will receive regular updates or “pings” whenever they make their own LinkedIn updates, which is helpful information and often fun, too.
6. LinkedIn is a great way to find former classmates and long-lost friends. People will inevitably find you, too: one quickly learns to gracefully ignore “link beggers.”  The strength of your network, after all, is based on the understanding that everyone’s ”1st degree” contacts are people she can honestly recommend.  It is perfectly appropriate, and tactful, to simply ignore any invitations from the high school boyfriend you never want to see again. Yes, really! 

Whaddya waiting for?  It won’t take long before you’ll be a true Insider, and then you’ll be ready for the latest in LinkedIn humor, too…

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And the episodes are FUNNY.

In the Motherhood hopes to become a major destination site, and so far it seems to be succeeding. I love the boldness of pairing the collaborative nature of the web with the professional production values already used by the television and movie industry. And all of this effort is aimed not at the still-highly-male-IT-industry, but at mothers. Hurray!

Oh sure — it’s still a marketing ploy. Nevertheless, it is also truly entertaining while managing to avoid the condescension and banality that still plagues so many “mommy” websites.

So hats off to ‘em, is what I say.

2. Nonprofit online news
Every new executive needs to invest time in keeping up with her new industry. This site provides the latest news from and about the online nonprofit community.

3. Technology for the Nonprofit and Philanthropic Sector
Keep up with the times or get left behind! With nonprofit giving remaining fairly steady while the number of NP organizations continues to grow, it’s getting pretty competitive out there. Smart NPs know they need to pursue new audiences and new approaches (social networking, e-philanthropy, push technology.)

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Quick lesson: build a feed reader

The quick instructions I gave in the previous post will work, and if getting too techy makes your head hurt and your elbows get all twitchy, then stop reading right here. Which is just fine. I’ll never love technology for its own sake either!

For those still reading, my brilliant brother has reminded me that it is still probably best (if you are able to do so) to optimize/compress your photos *before* you upload them anywhere. (Easy on Photoshop: just choose “save for web” option. With Corel or other photo programs, you can usually choose the “save as” command and specify that you want to save file at a higher compression — or at a lower resolution, which means the same thing.) This will make your photos load much faster, which matters for readers with a dial-up internet — especially if you use a lot of photos.

I do this all the time with my webpage work, but was just being lazy with the blog!

Optimizing isn’t really an option if all you’re doing is linking to photos someone else has already uploaded to Flickr, though, so a fast work-around is to use SMALLER versions of the photos! I may do this from now on, while optimizing my OWN so I can still use them at 500 pixels wide. I like ‘em big, especially when I am looking them on my tiny notebook’s screen!!

As you may gather by now, there are many ways to make blogging very complicated. It can quickly become overwhelming if you let it, so in a word: don’t. It’s perfectly acceptable to use a good shortcut until you have the time, skill and inclination to dig deeper and wider.

Here’s how to create a Google Feed reader for yourself. I use Google because it is free and easy to use, and no Google is not paying for the endorsement!

1. Click here to open Google Reader.  (You now have two windows open, so you can still read this.)
2. Sign in if you already have a Google account (or use gmail)… otherwise, click “create an account now” and follow instructions to create your account.
3. Choose your headlines (= “subscriptions”).  There are three ways to add new blogs or news (e.g., CNN) to your reader.
   –  (easiest): click “browse” to see Google’s suggestions to get you started.  Click the ones you want to add. —-OR —-
   –  click “browse” and type in the title of the blog or news site you want to add (e.g. “How to (almost) get the job,”) then select  the one you want to add it. —- OR —-
   –  click “add subscription” if you already know the feed URL, which you can find on many blogs by clicking on this icon: 

   

4. A list of your subscriptions appears at left, and any with new content will be highlighted (everything will be highlighted when you start!).  Click highlighted headlines to see new content.  New content will be “marked as read” as you read it.  If you don’t want to read it, click “mark as read” to de-activate the “newness” of the uninteresting content.
5. To save (or “clip”) interesting articles, click the star icon by that article.  Starred articles will be filed under “Starred items,”  top left, for you to read later.
6. Click “manage subscriptions” now or later to get rid of any that you don’t want.

Plea to readers:

Have a comment, correction, or tip on this subject? What feed reader(s) do you use?  What are your favorite subscriptions?  Do you use your feeder professionally, and if so, how? 
 

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Many apologies for the delay in getting our RSS feed working correctly.  According to feedburner.com support staff, our feed is wonderful in every way, but it keeps timing out. It may be a problem with my new host.  Another one for my brilliant brother…

Would any of y’all be interested in a short tutorial post on how to subscribe to a blog’s “feed” and set up a little feedreader of your own? It’s a great way to keep track of/skim through a lot of blogs (or other news sites) in one place.  You can also subscribe to many blogs by email (including this one)

Yesterday he played a dirty trick, though.  I asked him how to do something,  and he showed me by doing it and sending me a screen shot… but then he undid what he’d done, just to make me learn how to do it myself. 

And then, when I complained, he had no sympathy whatsoever.

“Just edit that CSS file, Almost!  If you break it, no problem.  Just reload the plugin or skin.”

He thinks I actually know what I’m doing.  As if!  I keep trying to explain to him that what I mainly do on websites is called “content management,”  and when I see all that scripting code stuff I mostly just want to go back outside and play in my compost. 

I’m such a fraud. 

We expect to launch next week.   Everything will move over, including all of the comments you’ve written which are about my favorite part.   We’ll have a couple of days of overlap with both sites up and plenty of link information for you.   Posting may be spotty, therefore, until after the July 4th holiday.

Thanks so much, friends, for staying with me.  I love BOTH of you, still!    You make my day.

Invented (according to Web Worker Daily) by software developer Brad Neuberg, Coworking is “a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.”  Mostly young, mostly hip independent workers are trading their pj’s and isolation for shared work space where they can network, meet clients, and enjoy some of the time- and space-structuring benefits of “going to an office.”

Click here to watch Brad and some of his colleagues in a “learn more about it” video.

While it’s not an entirely new concept, the current “coworker movement” among the growing number of (mostly web) workers is clearly taking advantage of the social connectivity provided by the internet to collaborate in forming a number of “coworking” spaces  already available (or currently being formed) throughout the US. 

It’s a really neat idea.  What I want to know is whether they accept anyone older than 25, and if you can still get a mocha?

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