I follow Abbie Lundberg, a friend and former Editor-in-Chief of CIO magazine, who recently started her own business. By following Abbie’s tweets I became aware of and registered for a couple of online courses in Social Media, learned of some new sites about business and strategy, and kept up with the adventures and discoveries she’s had while getting her business off the ground (many of which I can relate to from the past couple years). I follow Abbie’s tweets and her comments on FaceBook.

I also follow Chris Koch, also from CIO, who now writes for ITSMA. Chris offers very thought-provoking and engaging marketing research and commentary and usually provides sources that are valuable reads. I like how he ends most of his posts with “What do you think”? I can find his announcements of newly published posts on FaceBook.

Yet another former CIO colleague, Meredith Levinson, recently contacted me to help her author-husband design and develop a new web site to highlight and build community around his work. I doubt that Meredith would have thought of me if it were not for my visibility (and hers) on FaceBook.

In my own case, I recently sent out a tweet mentioning that I am now putting up sites on cloud computing platforms. I need to write something more about this experience soon, but just sending that out brought followers to my Twitter stream and also a couple of inquiries for more information and my insights. That’s powerful stuff!

What I have found, of necessity, is that I need some simple and efficient way to manage this activity. And with the tools at hand (WordPress, FaceBook, and Twitter) I have found that. I have my “channel” set now so that if I Tweet something, it ends up not only on Twitter, but also (and most importantly, automatically) on FaceBook and the sidebar of my blog. Equally, if I write a new blog post, it shows up as a new status item on FaceBook and as a new Tweet. This is where the power lies: the ability to create items of interest and distribute them efficiently, and in the best case, cheaply.

Sure, once in a while I tweet about the dog getting loose or running through a FastLane, but for me these platforms are not just about keeping in touch; they are about keeping people connected and informed.

David Churbuck recently tweeted a quote from Mark Cahill to the affect that “Personal Branding is an artificial edifice that is antithetical to the …. authenticity expected in Social Media Marketing.” This generated a very passionate discussion, mostly because of the definition of Personal Branding. Mark was referring to the bad kind (people who hire others to blog and tweet for them); but several commentors were quick to point out that for many of us (especially those with our owns businesses) social media is a perfect place to inform and communicate with an audience of supporters and potential clients.

That’s why I’m here: to promote the work I do, to encourage people to engage my services, and to learn from my highly respected friends and colleagues. I also like to see where Al Sacco is drinking this weekend.

Bloggers are columnists – not reporters, and the successful bloggers have tight niches, and those niches tend to be ones which might never be filled in print media. The problem is that as bloggers, we don’t have a copy editor telling us we’ve got to get the opposing viewpoint, or suggesting that we ought to give the subject of our scathing rebuke the chance to respond, in print, in our own column. We more likely don’t have anyone even checking our spelling or grammar.

Even worse, most of us never leave our cubible, like the columnists Alan refers to. Rather than emulating Royko, we emulate Andy Rooney, and are more likely to write about the “what’s up with paperclips?”

I agree with this assessment of bloggers. But blogging also can manifest the form of documentation and diary. For example, my friend Sebastien Wains writes a fabulous and informative blog on his discoveries as a Sysadmin. He likely does not consider it writing as much as his personal journal for the important nuggets he finds each day through his work. I, and I am sure others, find it very valuable and useful.

But do read Mark’s article on some of the really crazy things people will do to pump up the volume on traffic.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/VarioCreativeBlog/~3/112447979/

Having read both the hype and the dismissals, curiosity got the best of me: I created an account and downloaded the Second Life software. Within minutes I was bumping into virtual poles and falling into virtual rivers.

It seems like a fun game though. And there is certainly some reality to it. I walked up to a woman in the same orientation site as myself, said hello (or rather typed hello into the chat window), and she walked away saying nothing. Just like real life (in Boston, anyway). Fabulous.

But then I read things in places like Forbes magazine that say Second Life is going to burst wide open, like the Internet did no less. It’s going to be the next big thing and there’s lots of investment behind it. IBM uses it for virtual meetings. In fact, I read that you can actually buy real estate in there, islands no less, and create private little worlds. Spending real dollars buying virtual islands, pixels on a file server.

I don’t know. I’m missing something in this discussion, I admit. It seems like forums with cartoons. People are hoping customers will buy things in there? Companies will provide support in there? Damn, I have a hard enough time getting good support from many companies out here. Am I to drop myself (my avatar, rather) into a virtual world and expect something different? Dream on.

I wonder if I’ll get taken to task like David Churbuck did when he said he didn’t like Second Life after admittedly using it for less than ten hours. I used it for about an hour and don’t care for more than that. Seems like a game to me, money or not.

This is a wonderful plugin for Firefox. I’ve been spending a lot of time recently tagging the articles I am reading. But it is bothersome to have to have another Firefox tab open to create the tags (and more so to cut and paste between them). Using a simple right-click on any page, this plugin opens a Firefox window with all the fields I need for tagging, many of them already populated. It even grabs the tags from my personal del.icio.us acount (while also recommending others). Very, very cool and highly recommended.

Reading Matt McAlister’s blog post today about personalized home pages offered by vendors like Google and NetVibes prompts me to throw in my $.02 about Pageflakes. I came across this customizable portal several days ago (I honestly do not remember where) and have been trying to use and to get used to it since. The concept is simple enough: you have a start page that allows you to add and delete components (called flakes) which are essentially services from a variety of vendors and brands. For example, the start page I have created comprises components listing CNN top stories and Technology bites, local weather, Google search interface, To-Do List, and bookmarks and a tag cloud which are fed by my posts in del.icio.us.

While Ubuntu ships with nearly everything you would ever require for your server or desktop, this is another list from LifeHacker that provides lots of great tips for making the environment even better.

This is an excellent list for anyone running WordPress as their blogging platform (I found this link on LifeHacker). They do, of course, require admin rights to add and configure. The list comprises many plugins that I use on my own site (Akismet, flickrRSS, FeedBurner Replacement) along with lots of other interestings tweaks. Down within the comments section are more reader-generated recommendations.

Here again is a link to Steve Borsch’s blog entry about why he blogs and why blogging is important for personal and professional reasons.

This is the stuff David Churbuck has been talking about on his blog and is also the driver behind some of his efforts at Lenovo. David’s focus is to reach out to their customers in new ways that foster a closer and more participatory relationship. Many claim they do this, but I think Lenovo is going well beyond the lip-service (David even posts his cell phone number as an example of personal comittment). I cannot comment further on a lot of this because I am new to this space and just now understanding web marketing and some of the new models for building community; I write about it here mostly to make others aware.

With this Lenovo experiment, I am mostly interested to see if the blogging and interfacing catches on. For example, I love my Toshiba laptop. I love the design, the power, everything about it. If I need support, I’ll go to their site or make a call (I haven’t had to yet, fortunately). But I don’t think I’m that interested in reading news from their corporate team. That’s the interesting part to wait and see, how Lenovo will build that audience and participation.

Within the Manifesto, however, the emphasis and understanding of the importance of the intranet is something that resonates with me. I have long been a huge proponent of the intranet as hub of corporate culture and community (and the extranet as its external partner). That this document gives voice to that in human terms is relatively new to me (and apparently others as well) and very exciting as I seek to define myself and my potential roles in this space.

I also find it interesting that all these years after the invention of the Internet that still so much conversation is based on the power of hyperlinks. Such a simple part of the overall structure and capability of the web has such force. Hyperlinks radicalize common hierarchical structures. Hyperlinks extend beyond what we might otherwise group in logical fashion.

I’ve heard his name before but Doc Searls’ (co-author of the Manifesto, writer, speaker, and many other things) and his weblog are also fascinating sources. Try working your way through some of the great bloggers he lists in his extensive blogroll.

Here also is a nice quote from J.P. Rangaswami on Building Society for the 21st Century which helps to clarify some of this philosophy:

Use what you stand for to attract the customer. Use what you do to retain the customer¹s trust. Ensure that the customer is always free to leave, and paradoxically he or she will stay. Who is this customer? Your family. Your friend. Your employee. Your business partner. Your client. Your citizen.

In a world of empowered individuals, everyone’s a customer.

It’s a simple mechanism that counts all the posts within a given Category and then assigns a font size based on a range within where those counts fall. The display of the category tags and their post counts is then random, creating a different cloud formation each time the page is visited or reloaded.