Mary Hodder twittered this today and I just had to pass it along:
IF I HAD TWITTER (The Twitter Song)* **
If I had Twitter I'd tweet in the morning I'd tweet in the evening All over this LAN I'd tweet out danger I'd tweet out a warning I'd tweet out love between my brothers and my sisters All over this WAN
If I had a cell phone I'd txt in the morning I'd txt in the evening All over gsm I'd txt out danger I'd txt out a warning I'd txt out love between my brothers and my sisters All over this closed-source nightmare of overcharging dinosaurs
la la la
If I had a photo I'd flickr in the morning I'd flickr in the evening All over this land I'd flickr out danger I'd flickr out a warning I'd flickr out love between my brothers and my sisters All over this land
Well I've got Twitter And I've got a cell phone And I've got flickr'd photos All over this open web It's the tweet of justice It's the txt of freedom It's the datasharing love between my brothers and my sisters All over this LAND
* words and music adapted from Lee Hays and Pete Seeger ** parody of online culture by Mary Hodder.
I travel with lots of little gadgets for media making. How do you carry yours? Show me your bag?
Since I am about to take off on a trip, I gathered up my stuff and took inventory. I was expected to be annoyed by the number of power supplies, but as Jim Storer pointed out, you can charge almost anything via USB these days. The more enlightened manufacturers equip their devices with USB ports, and for those that don't Malleable Devices provides adapters. It's a good thing, since the presence of a USB port on the device is not always a guarantee that the device will accept power that way. For example, my Nokia N95. Indeed, among my devices, only the laptop and the Bose headphones require custom power adapters.
My kit, clockwise from top center:
IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpad T43p
Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks - for Seesmic and Skype
I'll dump the Treo as soon as I can figure out how to make the GPS work in the N95, although the separate Bluetooth GPS is convenient for sticking in the window of the airplane. Getting rid of that and a few power supplies might give me room for some clothes in my carry-on bag.
TweetWheel is yet another example of how a system as simple and elegant as Twitter can, with a suitably open API, spawn all sorts of interesting and useful applications.
You give TweetWheel your Twitter username and it shows you all the people you follow and draws arcs among them to show you which of your friends are following each other. It's a little buggy - not all the arcs show up, but it's an interesting way to measure the density of your social network. UPDATE: The developer says TweetWheel only fetches the first 100 friends for each of your friends, so that's why it can sometimes miss connections.
TweetWheel is the work of Augusto Becciu in Buenos Aires.
Thanks to Paul Grous for alerting me to this one and illustrating one of the valuable aspects of Twitter: "If the news is important it will find me,"
This morning the Boston Social Media Breakfast moved across the street to Ryles and filled the room with local entrepreneurs at Twitterati.
Today's topic was Hiring/Getting Hired in a 2.0 World. Stever Robbins led off with his Ten Great Cultural Career Lies (v3) and an admonition to use social media such as Twitter as a tool to make connections which can lead to a conversation rather than as a substitute for the conversation itself. (Video here.)
Aaron Strout described how he filled some recent positions at Mzinga by forsaking the usual resume/interview process and using social media to source and evaluate candidates. Of course he did end up bringing the finalists in for face-to-face meetings, but he found using Twitter, LinkedIn, etc to be much more productive than the old way of doing business, since it gave him more insight into the candidates than he could get through a prepared resume. He has more on his blog and there is video here
Todd Defren has been using a similar approach at SHIFT Communications. He said that for the most part the people they want to hire "are already known to them" through Twitter and other forms of social media. The last three hires came to them that way. [I have no video of his talk, since the combination of my Nokia N95/AT&T/Qik stopped working and I had to reboot my phone(!) but he has written about this at his blog.]
Chris Brogan gave an entertaining talk about how he got his first job at The Phone Company and how he left there (just in time) for a series of jobs where his reputation preceded him. (video)
During the Q&A (video, more video, even more video) I asked if hiring through social media branding applied equally well to positions outside of the marketing function. I've seen it work for PR people (Amanda Gravel at SHIFT, Amanda Mooney) and consultants (Stowe Boyd, Laura Fitton) but how well does it work for people whose jobs don't involve a market-facing role, such as engineering, IT, or accounting, or for companies who have not embraced social media. The answer from the speakers was that (1) al companies would need to embrace social media if they wanted to survive and (2) that if they didn't you wouldn't want to work there anyway. That was good advice for the assembled Faithful, but it may be a bit premature for the average job seeker. Certainly I favor putting my time and money into companies that practice transparent business practices and communicate well with their customers, including encouraging their employees to do the same, but how to explain the success of Apple which is one of the least transparent and social-media-aware companies in the industry. In the ensuing discussion, the best answer we could come up with is that if you are going to present an old-school, opaque interface to the world, you had better be damn good at it, like Steve Jobs. For the rest of us, Mark Twain had good advice: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
