As a young professional, building a personal portfolio of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) is important to sell yourself for a promotion or for a new position elsewhere. Young and inexperienced Gen Y’s have to quickly build those KSA’s or risk being stuck in a rut. How else can we leverage our expertise in social networking and web tools?
Building Networks is More Than Just LinkedIN
Building an online network is easy. Just point, click, and wait. But with Twitter, Facebook status updates, posts, pictures, applications, it just seems to be a shouting match. Eventually, it’s questionably spam.
As we go from one job to another job, we bring more and more experience and proprietary knowledge. We learn company methodologies, techniques, and materials. While I don’t condone “stealing” confidential information and jumping ship to share company secrets, your thought process is inspired by the newfound knowledge. Furthermore, during your tenure at a company, build relationships, both with your internal staff and with external clients as well. Foster those relationships, even if you go work somewhere else.
With this “black book” of contacts, you will be much more valuable to the new firm. It provides business relationships and possible new clients. Alternatively, those contacts can be resources for you to tap into for subject matter knowledge.
What’s new with the new 3G iPhone? Well, 3G of course and GPS. There’s a list of slightly incremental enhancements such as the black back, flush head phone jack, rounder shape, and so forth; but there’s still a few key missing features:
More disk space - same 8 and 16 gig versions
Better camera - same 2MP, no autofocus camera (which is almost useless for advanced features)
No video recording - which might be able to be upgraded via software
No MMS - are you serious?
Copy and paste - a huge mistake but again, possible via software upgrade.
What is good about the 3G iPhone?
Other than the 3G and GPS as stated above, it has better battery life. 10 hours on 2G vs. 8 hours on old phone; and it has 5 hours on 3G. Oh, one more big thing, ATT is subsidizing it. The iPhone is now:
I’m heading out to SF for the weekend to take a break from blogging, work, and busy everyday life. In the mean time, I found this old video thanks to Lifehacker. I’ve read his book about the 4 hour work week and haven’t actually been sold on it yet.
After long consideration, evaluation, and reading hundreds of blogs, I came to the realization that advertising has diluted the quality of writing, specifically in my own blog. As of today, my site will be free of ads, namely Google Adsense, and any other form of paid banners, buttons, or graphics. What I do maintain on my blog are services I personally use and recommend, such as Twitter or the Brazen Careerist network. However, I receive no monetary compensation for displaying the links.
My main reasons for this choice is this:
Low return on investment - Adsense returns about $2 a month on average.
Turnoff - Readers are turned off on the monetization of the site.
Wrong purpose - I am not trying to make money on this blog. I’m hoping it will generate publicity and open doors to other opportunities.
Good old fashion basics - I miss the good old days of “dear diary.”
As a shareholder of Google, I read the Owners Manual for Google Shareholders. Both Larry and Sergey emulated the same technique that Warren Buffett employed with Berkshire Hathaway in his owner’s manual for shareholders. Essentially, it is a manifesto of their guiding principals for their business. It solidifies their long-term approach to business decisions and their pledge to their shareholders. It is also where the infamous phase, Don’t be Evil, came about:
We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.
How does this translate into starting a blog?
The ease and low barriers to entry inevitably equates to lower quality of information, often rippling throughout the blogosphere. Content is often copied in summary or literally in plagiarisms, and pasted into the thousands of blogs on the Internet. As such, it brings to question the validity and quality of information presented in these publications.
Here is a short list, but not complete, of ways that having an Owner’s Manual for a blog may help bring forth credibility to a blog:
