Month: March 2011

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Getting to grips with LinkedIn

Thanks to my recent posts about my confusion about the point of LinkedIn and coming to the conclusion that LinkedIn is a giant Rolodex, I was treated by their PR firm to a briefing session. Here’s what I learned.

On Monday Shiva Kumar, an associate director at Edelman, spent 90 minutes over coffee running through the advanced features, mostly following the sequence of items in How Journalists Use LinkedIn.

The key lesson for me was that while LinkedIn is certainly useful for recruiters and job-hunters, it’s even more powerful when you think of it as a global database of professionals and their skills, experiences and connections, and use it for smart data mining — and by that I mean data mining that’s aware of the structure of people’s working relationships.

Continue reading “Getting to grips with LinkedIn”

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Talking Hacking 101 on ABC Radio Darwin 105.7

This morning, in the wake of news that Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s email has been hacked along with those of other senior government members, the ABC’s Kate O’Toole spoke with me about the rise of hacking.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:04 — 5.1MB)

This material is ©2010 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, of course, but given that I provide my time for free and they don’t make the effort to make it available online, it’s only reasonable that I put it here and plug Kate O’Toole’s excellent program.

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Weekly Wrap 42

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — which this week wasn’t much because I was mostly working on invisible things for clients.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 81, “Twitter turns five: will it rule?” Despite its immense media profile, the vast majority of internet users do not use Twitter. Is that because they just haven’t taken up the service yet? Or is Twitter simply not for everyone? My guests were Kate Carruthers, Jeff Waugh and James Purser.

Articles

None. Oh dear.

Corporate Largesse

None. It turns out that, no, I couldn’t be bothered coming down to Sydney yesterday just for a party.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: The Blue Mountains Hotel, Lawson, photographed from the railway station platform on 24 March 2011. I had lunch there, and it was quite adequate.]

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50 to 50 #8: Chores and responsibility

[This post is part of the series 50 to 50, started last year to mark my 50th birthday. One post per year, y’see. The series ground to a halt due to a combination of work and personal pressures, as well as finding that such intense reminiscences of my own past were emotionally draining. Last night there was a conversation that triggered this attempt to resurrect the series.]

I’ve already written how we lived on the Mount Compass dairy farm for a decade, essentially through the 1960s. I’ve already written about its continual financial struggles and the joys of growing up as a free range kid. Today, to get this series back on track, some childhood memories that I’m sure have shaped my adult personality.

A dairy farm is a seven-day business, and a family farm is a family business. Everyone is expected to contribute. From the age of eight or nine I had my share of chores, and was given plenty of lessons in taking responsibility. I can remember simple tasks like feeding the dogs, helping clean the milking shed and lots of fetch-and-carry. But there were other chores that to a 21st century urban ear sound like a lot for an unsupervised young kid.

At the easier end of things was taking the two cattle dogs out to round up the cows for milking. Actually, the dogs did all the work. They’d see dad heading to the milking shed to start setting up and they’d kick off the round-up themselves, circling back to herd me and my brother if we fell behind. I’d also cycle the four or five kilometres into Mount Compass village to buy milk or bread or whatever. Easy stuff.

But there was more.

Continue reading “50 to 50 #8: Chores and responsibility”

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Visiting San Francisco for SuiteWorld

In May I’ll be visiting San Francisco for the third time in six months. This time it’s to attend NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference, on their tab.

Curiously enough, NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelson has been warning against the false cloud.

It’s pretty clear that everything is going to the cloud. I think the real issue is that there are real clouds and fake clouds. The fake clouds are people who are taking existing technology and saying, ‘We can host it for you and that’s the cloud’.

That is not the cloud. If the application is not web-native it’s not going to give you any of the benefits of the cloud. You’re not going to get any of this cost reduction, customisation migration or anytime, anywhere access because you are still using this funky intermediary technology to access that hosted application.

Microsoft is famous for saying ‘all our applications are in the cloud’. No they’re not. They’re their existing applications hosted someplace. That failed back in 1999 — how’s it going to succeed in 2010?

That’s interesting because Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff was also telling us to “beware of the false cloud” at their Dreamforce conference, which I attended in December. You can here him say exactly that on the Patch Monday podcast.

And that’s interesting because Nelson and Benioff used to be colleagues at Oracle. Funny old world.

Anyway, I’ll tell your more about this particular trip as it aproaches.

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So LinkedIn is a giant Rolodex, eh?

The other day I expressed my confusion over the point to LinkedIn. I now have the answer, thanks to an overwhelming number of comments. It’s a giant self-updating Rolodex. And it’s main use is recruitment — employees or freelancers finding work, or recruiters looking for staff.

That explains why it wasn’t making sense to me: I’m not in any of those categories. And when I am looking for work, well, I do media stuff. The people I’d want to contact are very public and easy to find. And I’m not wanting to “grow my business”. Fuck I hate that phrase.

That said, I can see that LinkedIn might be a useful tool for keeping track of the various people I interview for my media projects. Provided that LinkedIn allows me to add my own private notes to contacts — does it? — I’ll give it a go for a couple months and report back.

What also intrigued me is that having my comments posted on Hacker News led to a 2300% spike in traffic overnight — as well as a few people pimping their own internet start-ups. A different culture. Personally, I find the idea of drive-by commenting on a stranger’s website to promote your business to be… tasteless.

I agree with several people’s point that as a social network there isn’t much social in LinkedIn. People only checked back infrequently — such as when they were looking for jobs. I can see that LinkedIn is trying to encourage you to use the site more often, what with groups and stuff, but I got the feeling that this isn’t the way most people use the site. Am I right there?

Finally, as one person put it on Twitter, LinkedIn seems most useful for people who use “network” as a verb. Harsh, but fair.

[Update 30 March 2011: I’ve received a briefing session on LinkedIn, which I’ve now written about in Getting to grips with LinkedIn. I’ll close comments here and you can continue the conversation over there.]