Internet's revenio BBS versa The Net
Monday, 7. September 2009, 23:40:57
I really approve of this new evolving community on the internet, it feels more like the old Bulletin Board Systems that I consider to be the roots of "The Net" toward which we're evolving.
David Brin coined this term in his book EARTH back in 1990 and it so closely coincided with my perception of how personal computers were supposed to interface with our lives I've been using it ever since.
One of his postulates was a "dragon" or "weasel" that could ferret out the data you were seeking by sifting the unbelievable amount of material available on the Net and giving you a managable degree in a comfortable format. That was one of the "personal itches" of our heroine in David's story. Fortunately for us, Google has done a wonderful job of filling that need and is continuously developing more tools to empower us in managing the growing data storm available. Now though, comes that key word "available" because not all the data we might need is freely available today. Availability is vastly improved over the Compuserve and America On-Line days of yesteryear (which includes my beloved BBS era as well), but there are still interests involved in this evolution trying to lock up their data availability to subscribers only.
However, this is not my tirade for today, merely a side path to today's issue which is about administration of this new community.
My research into finding a better employment situation has uncovered some fascinating reading.
Dana tells a story about Rick Featherstone getting laid off of his job at DHL
and how he used our emerging Social Networking technology to find another job. Dana's main premise was how fast a rolodex can get stale and the need to use old connections in finding employment. She plugged LinkedIn and Plaxo whose stated purpose each is to help professionals maintain connection so that they can leverage them against professional goals and agendas. Michael Calore calls it "Lifestreaming"
and although he doesn't like FaceBook (leaning toward Google's more open FriendFeed) I've adopted them because they already had so many of my friends as members. Besides, my plunge into this new game is evolving as well, and I can make bad choices right along with the rest of the neophytes. My LinkedIn account is fairly old, I think I was introduced to it by Mark Peden, but it might have been Riggs too. Plaxo I discovered through Bud Hayes whom jokingly told me he shouldn't have to explain why he invited me because I was the one that tried to get him involved in BBS'n back in the bad old days. Bud is a really good guy.
As a matter of fact I've got a whole bunch of really good folks in my past life. Actually several lives depending on how you want to define the term. Grade School was a very different life to that in High School and then I went into the Army. Military is an extremely different life to that of any other and mine was exacerbated by being in Germany which is a completely different culture surrounded by many other diverse cultures. That coupled with the fact I was a tender 21 years of age is another parameter contributing to the difference. College was another culture shock, even though I did it in my hometown of Ashland so had very familiar haunts to frequent while wending my way through the hallowed halls, as it were. Then it was on to a variety of different "career opportunities" each with it's own failures and wins, foibles and wows, but all of those lives had good folks with whom I'd love to maintain a connection. Christmas card/letter technology (the old standby before the Net) falls down with me because I can't find enough round tuits.
BBS'n jumped to the fore in my life because I could type up a quick note, post it to the board and all my friends could keep up with me just by reading the public mail. Now it works very similarly with FaceBook and I get to keep up with them as well. I'm not really enamoured of the Farmville, Mafia Wars and which Greek God are you games on FaceBook and I'm still leary of Relations engines that you can join because I haven't completed researching the security aspects of this new game, that hasn't deterred me from having a lot of fun with it while doing the research.
How do I make it work for me though? I've been doing searches for old friends and that's the way to start according to all the help files and blog entries I've read so far. Administration is already showing as the weak point for me in this game because there are just too many aspects to it already. My blog is on my.opera.com, FaceBook is rapidly becoming "home", but I've also got Plaxo and LinkedIn, a Yahoo account, AOL account, MobileMe (used to be dotMac), my own domain PMAco.com and doing an occassional vanity search turns up a variety of Yellow Pages wannabes that have incorporated my company name in their databases, often with data badly in need of updating. For immediately I think I'll just tweak my homepage around to give me the links I need to get to each of these sites and keep them up to date, but ultimately I'm going to need David Brin's weasel or dragon to keep this from becoming another vocation. Another launch I did for the updates was to rifle all my old digital photos on the N-Drive and crop a bunch of 200x200 pixel "mugshots" which I stashed in a subdirectory of my Blog_Photos subdirectory and uploaded most of them to FaceBook. When I'm searching for friends it makes it SO much easier if there is a somewhat current picture on their profile, so I've been getting those added to each of my accounts. With that completed I'll get started on the friend search in earnest and collect them according to category in LinkedIn, FaceBook and Plaxo.
I want to talk about friends now. God gave me a wonderful knack of making friends easily, but not all friends are created equal and therefore some are not connections I'm desirous of maintaining. Some of my past friends are extremely welcome to fade into the dim past of a blissfully bad memory and others have a signal to noise ratio way out of proportion to true value. So in my administration of this new game, I'm going to evaluate my "new" connections against a fairly lengthy spec before accepting them. Worse, I think I'll also be guilty of dropping friends off my list if the signal to noise ratio gets out of balance. I say that because my purpose here is to maintain a COMMUNITY of friendly connections, not collect people so that I can say I have over 1000 friends. Coming home to 380 new wall postings might be fun, but it could also turn into a job unto itself.
The adventure continues.
.
David Brin coined this term in his book EARTH back in 1990 and it so closely coincided with my perception of how personal computers were supposed to interface with our lives I've been using it ever since.
One of his postulates was a "dragon" or "weasel" that could ferret out the data you were seeking by sifting the unbelievable amount of material available on the Net and giving you a managable degree in a comfortable format. That was one of the "personal itches" of our heroine in David's story. Fortunately for us, Google has done a wonderful job of filling that need and is continuously developing more tools to empower us in managing the growing data storm available. Now though, comes that key word "available" because not all the data we might need is freely available today. Availability is vastly improved over the Compuserve and America On-Line days of yesteryear (which includes my beloved BBS era as well), but there are still interests involved in this evolution trying to lock up their data availability to subscribers only.
However, this is not my tirade for today, merely a side path to today's issue which is about administration of this new community.
My research into finding a better employment situation has uncovered some fascinating reading.
Dana tells a story about Rick Featherstone getting laid off of his job at DHL
and how he used our emerging Social Networking technology to find another job. Dana's main premise was how fast a rolodex can get stale and the need to use old connections in finding employment. She plugged LinkedIn and Plaxo whose stated purpose each is to help professionals maintain connection so that they can leverage them against professional goals and agendas. Michael Calore calls it "Lifestreaming"
and although he doesn't like FaceBook (leaning toward Google's more open FriendFeed) I've adopted them because they already had so many of my friends as members. Besides, my plunge into this new game is evolving as well, and I can make bad choices right along with the rest of the neophytes. My LinkedIn account is fairly old, I think I was introduced to it by Mark Peden, but it might have been Riggs too. Plaxo I discovered through Bud Hayes whom jokingly told me he shouldn't have to explain why he invited me because I was the one that tried to get him involved in BBS'n back in the bad old days. Bud is a really good guy.
As a matter of fact I've got a whole bunch of really good folks in my past life. Actually several lives depending on how you want to define the term. Grade School was a very different life to that in High School and then I went into the Army. Military is an extremely different life to that of any other and mine was exacerbated by being in Germany which is a completely different culture surrounded by many other diverse cultures. That coupled with the fact I was a tender 21 years of age is another parameter contributing to the difference. College was another culture shock, even though I did it in my hometown of Ashland so had very familiar haunts to frequent while wending my way through the hallowed halls, as it were. Then it was on to a variety of different "career opportunities" each with it's own failures and wins, foibles and wows, but all of those lives had good folks with whom I'd love to maintain a connection. Christmas card/letter technology (the old standby before the Net) falls down with me because I can't find enough round tuits.
BBS'n jumped to the fore in my life because I could type up a quick note, post it to the board and all my friends could keep up with me just by reading the public mail. Now it works very similarly with FaceBook and I get to keep up with them as well. I'm not really enamoured of the Farmville, Mafia Wars and which Greek God are you games on FaceBook and I'm still leary of Relations engines that you can join because I haven't completed researching the security aspects of this new game, that hasn't deterred me from having a lot of fun with it while doing the research.
How do I make it work for me though? I've been doing searches for old friends and that's the way to start according to all the help files and blog entries I've read so far. Administration is already showing as the weak point for me in this game because there are just too many aspects to it already. My blog is on my.opera.com, FaceBook is rapidly becoming "home", but I've also got Plaxo and LinkedIn, a Yahoo account, AOL account, MobileMe (used to be dotMac), my own domain PMAco.com and doing an occassional vanity search turns up a variety of Yellow Pages wannabes that have incorporated my company name in their databases, often with data badly in need of updating. For immediately I think I'll just tweak my homepage around to give me the links I need to get to each of these sites and keep them up to date, but ultimately I'm going to need David Brin's weasel or dragon to keep this from becoming another vocation. Another launch I did for the updates was to rifle all my old digital photos on the N-Drive and crop a bunch of 200x200 pixel "mugshots" which I stashed in a subdirectory of my Blog_Photos subdirectory and uploaded most of them to FaceBook. When I'm searching for friends it makes it SO much easier if there is a somewhat current picture on their profile, so I've been getting those added to each of my accounts. With that completed I'll get started on the friend search in earnest and collect them according to category in LinkedIn, FaceBook and Plaxo.
I want to talk about friends now. God gave me a wonderful knack of making friends easily, but not all friends are created equal and therefore some are not connections I'm desirous of maintaining. Some of my past friends are extremely welcome to fade into the dim past of a blissfully bad memory and others have a signal to noise ratio way out of proportion to true value. So in my administration of this new game, I'm going to evaluate my "new" connections against a fairly lengthy spec before accepting them. Worse, I think I'll also be guilty of dropping friends off my list if the signal to noise ratio gets out of balance. I say that because my purpose here is to maintain a COMMUNITY of friendly connections, not collect people so that I can say I have over 1000 friends. Coming home to 380 new wall postings might be fun, but it could also turn into a job unto itself.
The adventure continues.
.


















