Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Spokeo – a catch-all social networking tool

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Guy Kawasaki recently had a post on his blog about Spokeo which I thought, I had better check out. After getting over the irritation of not being able to use my preferred email address, I found it fascinating to get blogs, flickr streams and other more or less interesting news about people who happened to be in my hotmail address book – if nothing else this was a prime example of why we should always consider to weed our contacts lists from time to time :-)

However, after my initial enthusiasm subsided I got irritated over several small things in the tool.
1) My LinkedIn contacts do not all seem to update – some of them stay as numbers and although all profiles can be displayed by clicking on the number why can’t Spokeo at least retrive the name…

2) Organising information by person or alphabetically rather than by platform.
I mainly use LinkedIn and Facebook and have just over 100 in the former and between 20 and 30 Facebook friends. Still I would much rather be able to see information on a contact across several platforms rather than looking at all platforms before moving on to the next.

Otherwise an interesting tool, but personally I still prefer to visit people profile pages on LinkedIn and Facebook, especially if they include links to their Flickr stream, del.icio.us bookmarks and YouTube channel here.

Posted in Blogging, Communication, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social networking | No Comments »

YouBlog

Friday, October 12th, 2007

The latest entry on the LinkedIn blog on communicating effectively features something I haven’t seem before. In addition to the blog post, Chris Richman, also explains the content of the blog post in a YouTube video clip. Although one could argue this is presenting the information twice, I don’t feel that this is a tautology. This dual layer approach works very well and it is nice to see the content presented in a new way, possilby this should be called YouBlog.

The title of the blog post is “Communicating more effectively through LinkedIn” and this is exactly what the YouTube clip achieves. Well done and keep up the good work at LinkedIn.

Posted in Blogging, Communication, LinkedIn, YouTube, content | 2 Comments »

Is blogging a complete and utter waste of time?

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

According to the usually very erudite usability specialist, Jakob Nielsen, yes, blogging is a waste of time!

However, although I do find Jakob Nielsen’s article very interesting with several valid points, I think he misses out on certain central points.

1) Blog postings can be high quality and used to sample ideas/get feedback.
According to Nielsen, our time would be much better spent on writing fewer well-reflected articles in subject areas where we have knowledge. Although I appreciate this point, I still think the blog may serve as a sandpit for ideas, possible even first drafts for some ideas that later make it into an article. Also articles are often longer under way and in terms of online media thing may have changed dramatically during this space of time.

2) Interaction is the message.
Although Nielsen in his profession, may be better off by writing regular articles on his areas of expertise, I would argue that especially politicians (as discussed in Nielsen’s examples) might benefit from a dialogue and asking for user participation. I am by no means advocating that user dialogue is the only form of communication, but I think the user participation is ever more important.

 Keep blogging.

Posted in Blogging, Communication | 1 Comment »