It took me all of 11 seconds of looking at the tags to determine Bose Audio and 21 seconds to figure out another tag cloud was Second Life. It took me about 10 seconds to guess Jif Peanut Butter, but I spelled it wrong, so they didn’t count it.
As the site points out: “the basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.” This is a really interesting way to see what people think of well known brands. I’ve also found Amazon’s experiment with user tags to be a similiar, but real-world example of this same idea. Anyone can add a tag to a product. I’ve seen some really interesting tags that surprised me. For example, someone is clearly on a mission against homeopathic treatments because you’ll find many tags like “junk science” and “total crap” on those products. There’s a potentially serious brand management issues here.
We can add user tagging to the long list of UGC that companies need to get really smart about really fast. If nothing else, they should be listening.
This is a new find that I discovered while seeing if anyone else had written about a new idea I’ve had. Not only did I find no one writing about this idea (yeah!) but I stumbled upon SlideShare.net. And of course, Rohit Bhargava and Jesse Thomas already were there, which is great because Rohit had posted this great presentation! (below)
While tooling around on the site I also notice that over 4,000 people have viewed this presentation. 4000. Got that?
If you give good PowerPoint, SlideShare.net could be one of your best ways to prove your expertise online. That is, if you give good PowerPoint — and most of us don’t. But, if you have a killer presentation and aren’t afraid to share it. Post it to SlideShare.net and let me know! I promise I’ll give it a look, possibly a mention, and give you my honest opinion on it.
The blogosphere is abuzz today about Flickr Vision, so I felt like I needed to at least do a quick post on it. Flickr Vision is a mashup site that shows you, in real time, the pictures that people are posting to Flickr on a big map. It’s incredible hypnotic and incredible weirdly fabulous. Go check it out, but be aware that you could just lose days staring at the screen as the pictures appear from all over the world.
It’s amazing how a simple idea like this can just set everyone talking!
I’ve been looking more and more at Linkedin.com lately and I’ve found a couple of really interesting uses for it. Let’s start with the unique window LinkedIn.com is providing into people’s resumes. Generally, you really have no idea what other people’s resumes look like. Yes, you can buy a book or ask a few people — but having access to thousands of people’s resumes is a goldmine of information. What’s also very illuminating is how people choose to present themselves professionally. I know I’d like to be Rohit Bharghava, Chris Heuer, or Kristie Wells when I grow up (figuratively speaking, of course), and now I can take a look at their resumes and be even more intimidated than I was before.
But seriously, now I can see what they did to get where they are and understand the training and career path that lead them there. Reading what they say now on their blogs, or having a couple of drinks with them helps too, but now I know what the benchmarks are for moving forward with my own career goals. Considering my own untraditional background, which you can see on my LinkedIn.com profile, it’s really helpful to know what kind of education and training my peers and betters have had, and look at that in context with their work now. I’m also finding it helpful to see how they explain what they do, and what they choose to highlight about their work and lives. I’ve probably updated my profile a 1/2 dozen times based on something I’ve seen on someone else’s.
So if you’ve ever wondered what the resume of someone who beat you out for a job looks like — now you can find out. Just head on over to LinkedIn.com and look them up. If you just can’t wait for my next installment, head over to LinkedIntelligence, it turns out they are running a promotion to get bloggers like me to write about LinkedIn.com, so there will be lots of interesting info about how to use LinkedIn.com. BTW — I had already planned to do several articles about the site when they brought the “group blogging, idea to my attention.
Linkedin.com is a professional networking site. Think of it as where you go after Facebook. Or if you’ve never heard of Facebook, think of it as an online, ongoing networking event. Most of the people I know who have joined LinkedIn, including me, have then sat there staring at the screen saying, “now what?” Part of that had to do with early adopters being presented with few options other than job hunting. Now that’s all changing, and LinkedIn has a variety of new tools for ongoing business networking.
One of the issues with LinkedIn, is that it does require you to understand the basic value of networking. As bizarre as it may seem, I’m actually quite bad at it — except online. So LinkedIn has presented me with a challenge up until they started having the new “Answers” area. Now I get it. Now I can see what questions other people have and engage them in conversation. That, I’m good at. The new Firefox and Outlook plugins that now let you see how you are connected to the people who email you, is adding a whole new interesting social networking element.
I also find that just seeing how other people choose to present themselves professionally on a site like this is helpful. How do they describe their jobs? What interests, both personal and professional, do they post? Who else do they know? How many contacts do they have? Can they possibly know all of those people or are they just big LinkedIn whores? I also like seeing who’s hiring and what the jobs are. It’s not that I’m looking, but that I like to see what’s happening and what kind of jobs are developing. As someone who spends a lot of time looking at information and analyzing trends — you’d be amazed (or not) at how much you can learn about a company or industry by who and what they are hiring.
So dive in and get started on LinkedIn.com. Give yourself time to get over the “now what” phase, and see what you can do. If nothing else, it’s a great way to establish a professional presence online.
The timing couldn’t be better. Yesterday, I talked about Flickr, and one of the few things missing from Flickr is photo editing. You can use the resizing features, but that takes a little more know-how, and it’s only default sizes.
Margie over at EcologicalHope.org emailed me this morning about a problem she was having, which turned out to be related to her posting images that were just too big. So I went digging in my Ma.gnolia archives to find the online photo editors I’ve been collecting, snipshot.com being one of my favorites. Then I see SnipShot profiled on Craftzine today, and well, I decided that it was fate telling me to share this fabulous resource with others.
One of the biggest problems people have when they first start their own website or blog is photos and images. It’s an entirely different tool set for people. Understanding the formats and optimal physical and file sizes for images can be more complicated than I usually expect, and frankly most photo editing software is ridiculously complex for civilians! That’s where handy tools like SnipShot come in. I recommend it to my social media coaching clients and to my clients at CDG. It’s really one of the easiest ways to edit your photos for online use, and let me stress this — it’s for online use — not print.
I love that it now has a Firefox plugin and works with Flickr. That just makes it even better and easier to use. Seamless integration between different services is a hallmark of Web 2.0 — give a little and get a little.
Flickr is a photo sharing site with great social features. I’ve discovered that many people think of Flickr as just an online photo album, but if so — they are really missing the fun. I freely admit that I’m a bit of a Flickr addict, and the pro account someone gave me as a gift, is something that I wouldn’t give up on a bet now.
Let’s walk through the basic features:
Photo Upload & Re-sizing
Photo Organizing into Sets & Collections
Photo Sharing, public or friends only
Photo exploration
Contacts & Favorites
Create, Join, and Participate in Interest Groups — share photos and discussions
Getting Started
To get started on Flickr, just sign up for a free account. You can post about 200 photos for free. Then start exploring. You don’t even need to post your own pictures. You can explore other people’s and share your thoughts about them. Comments are a great way to engage on Flickr, and build relationships. If you really like a photo, mark it as a favorite or add the person as a contact so you can keep up with their pictures.
Learn how to create connections that work. I’ll guide you through the world of sites, techniques and technologies and walk through what they are, who uses them, how you can engage on them effectively and honestly.
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Through the Years
This site has been through many iterations since I first launched it in the Summer of 2000. Every iteration since 2001 is actually captured in the Internet Archive.
