Jonathan

17 Tips for Finding a Job with Social Media

February 26, 2009 2 Comments

In the current economic situation, social media has emerged as a powerful tool for the newly jobless. There have been countless posts about the coming of social media and what it means, mostly in the abstract. But right now, social media provides a practical use job hunting.

Your social networking activity is basically your own personal cloud that you can pluck for your own benefit. Most of the jobs that you will get in your life will not be from a classified ad or a job ad. You will have found out about them from your personal network – virtual and physical. Social media creates a bigger network, allowing you to connect with more people and to find out about more job opportunities.

Many Web 2.0 pundits have been decrying the loss of privacy in the Web 2.0 age, as well as sending out warning signs to control how much information you allow out there about yourself. Now, the focus is shifting to how you can mange your personal brand message on social media sites and use them to grow your career.

So, how can you use social media to find a job?

1. Connecting

On the most basic level, social networking communities allow you to connect with your friends and co-workers. This is your closest network and the most valuable in a job search. Keep your friends close and your former friends closer.

2. Reconnecting

Social networking allows you to reconnect with former co-workers and friends that you haven’t heard from for awhile. This widens the net from just staying connected with a close network of friends. I call it the ‘beer factor.’ If it’s someone you’d be willing to go out and get a beer with and shoot the breeze about a former job or company, then they are worth reconnecting with.

3. Profiles

Take the time to fill in the details on all of your social networking accounts. Your goal should be transparency so people can know who you are immediately and see a pattern across all your accounts. Fill in your Facebook profile, Twitter account profile and Linkedin profile. Potential employers and connections want to find out as much about you as they can. Control the message. You’ve got the time on your hands.

4. Squeeky Clean Image

If you’re using social networking to find a job, it is probably a good idea to take the pictures off your Facebook profile from your bender a few weeks ago. Companies want you to appear to be above reproach. That means your online persona needs to reflect this. So, polish all your social media profiles and remove anything that might offend even the slightest of sensibilities.

5. RSS Feeds

One of the best ways to keep up on the latest job postings is to find job websites that have RSS feeds of the latest jobs. For example, all Craigslist job boards have an RSS feed. There are many other second tier job sites that have this feature. The big boys like Monster.com and Careerbuilder have failed at this. There are many many niche job websites that feature a wide array of jobs in specific industries. Do a search for them, they are out there. Also, create free Google Alerts to notify you whenever a job matching your criteria comes on the net.

6. Twitter

Twitter can help you greatly in a job search. First, Twitter allows you to directly connect with your network. I have gotten many job leads from people I follow on Twitter. Second, Twitter allows you to widen the net of your network. If you’re looking to relocate to another city or already live in a big one, follow players in your field and then engage directly with them. You build a reputation and increase the likelihood that you’ll find out about a job first. Third, there are many Tweeps out there that solely list jobs (such as @ukseojobs or @seojobs) so you can be notified as soon a job goes on the market.

7. Linkedin

Linkedin should be the center of any job search. It’s been said that Linkedin is the Facebook for professionals and that’s exactly what it is. Linkedin allows you to have a professional online presence that shows your work experience. You can also connect with co-workers and former co-workers, who can recommend each other. Linkedin is also becoming a great place to list jobs and also find out about jobs before they go on the major job sites.

8. Facebook

Most people think that Facebook is just for fooling around but it has many good uses on a job hunt. Your friends will be a good source of job leads. Also, you can join many Facebook groups related to your industry that will allow you to network with potential colleagues.

9. Blogging

Running a blog is a great way to prove your knowledge. Who would you rather hire? A person with a polished resume and years of experience? Or the person with a polished resume, years of experience and a successful blog about his/her industry? It’s a no brainer. If you can paint yourself as an expert in your field, it will only help your career prospects.

10. Casting a Wide Net

The main goal of using social media to get a job is to get your personal brand in as many places as possible. The more you engage fellow professionals the more likely you are to find out about of job or get a good recommendation.

11. The Desperation Factor

Don’t be a social network spammer. Don’t just connect with people to extract job leads from them or bug them about needing a job. Connect with them to connect with them. You will get no where complaining about your life situation or acting like you deserve help. People come onto social networks to get away from the negative forces in life, don’t become one.

12. Don’t Burn Bridges

Don’t start trashing your former employer on the social networks. This will alienate your former co-workers and poison the possibility of your bosses giving you a good recommendation. Bad social media PR is very damaging to a company in this day and age. Anything you say on a social network will get indexed by the search engines and it will take a very long time to remove. Your anger could damage your job prospects for years.

13. Social Media in the Real World

Start getting involved in local, in person gatherings that are organized on social media sites. Visit the local tweet-up or industry gathering. Establishing a person to person relationship will be infinitely more valuable than connecting online. So, next time you see a Tweet-up in your area, it’s a good idea to go, even if you feel secure in your job.

14. Pay it Forward

If you get a job lead for something that’s out of your field of expertise, then by all means spread it across your social network accounts. You’ll spread goodwill and also have connections in the future that will only help you.

15. Professional Blog Commenter

You’ve got time on your hands, don’t you? Become a prolific commenter on blogs in your industry. Become a recognized name. This can fit well into a regular blogging strategy. Getting yourself noticed will only help you in a job hunt and will ingratiate you to bloggers who enjoy engaging with their commenters.

16. Engagement

Don’t just try to connect with people, engage with them. If you see a controversial discussion going on across your Twitter feed, participate in it. If someone has a question that you can answer, by all means answer it. Don’t spend all your time talking about yourself, engage others and talk with them not AT them.’

17. Leave No Connection Unturned

Connect with everyone in your industry. You may think it’s a waste of time connecting with a secretary or an entry level person, but those are people you want to be in your court. The first rule of job interviewing is always be nice to the receptionist when you arrive. There is no reason why this should not count in the virtual realm.

Using social media to find a job will take time and you will get out of it, what you put into it. It’s going to be hard work and your going to have spend a lot of time doing it. But the potential rewards are huge. Not only can you find a new job, but you can also make new lifelong friends.

8 of the Best Adobe AIR Applications

August 5, 2008 3 Comments

Adobe AIR showed a lot of potential during its period of public beta but unfortunately had very few applications that really took advantage of the technology. Thankfully over the last month or so we have begun to see some impressive and useful applications being released.

Here is my pick of the current offerings:

1. Alert Thingy

A favourite of many Alert Thingy started as a FriendFeed application but has since added support for Twitter and the ability to upload photos to Flickr. If you are a user of these services then you will love being able to access the services from within the same interface and window.

2. Guitar Scales V2

This is a great little application, although obviously it will only appeal to a small group of you. Using the virtual fretboard like below you can find any scale for a range of options including root notes, scale types, number of strings, number of frets and tunings.

This information can be found elsewhere online, but I don’t know one other resource that freely provides this information in a way that rivals Guitar Scales for simplicity and functionality.

3. Klok

“Klok is a tool intended to be used by individuals, like myself, who have a need to track the time they spend on projects, tasks or anything else for that matter.” If you find Klok to be a bit more complicated then what you need, I recommend Timecloc which is much simpler and is essentially a stop watch, although you can still add different projects.

4. ReadAir

“ReadAir is an OSX Themed Desktop Client for Mac or Windows. Built with Adobe Air” and available for download from Google Code. I wasn’t actually aware of this one till today due to it not being listed in the AIR application directory. DailyApps discovered it and ran an article about it yesterday.

5. Twhirl

Twhirl is another Twitter and FriendFeed client. Its main feature is the ability to be signed into multiple Twitter and FriendFeed accounts simultaneously. It has a tool for shortening URLs, you can update Pownce and Jaiku, upload pics to TweetPic and use TweetScan to search for tweets.

6. Pownce

pwnceshotI really wonder what the future of Pownce is. Successful startups all generally have one specific focus that can generally be summarized in one word or phrase. Google is search, Twitter is micro-blogging, Flickr is photo sharing and so on. Pownce seems to have a little of everything and as such is making little headway in any.

However If you are a Pownce user however then this application is a must; you’ll find it a great deal easier staying up to date on your contact’s latest notes, files and photos etc. An option I feel is lacking is the ability to minimize to the system tray.

7. Ebay Desktop

This is one of the first, and still one of the best, AIR applications. It’s impressive in that it really goes beyond replicating an online service on the desktop and instead extends and enhances the experience. Not only does it look great, but Ebay Desktop takes a far more graphical and interactive approach with the browsing, tracking and buying and selling of items.

Drag and drop functionality, instant search results and a real time clock that counts down to the end of the auction are some of the features in this app. If you are even an occasional Ebay user its worth giving Ebay Desktop a try.

8. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a favourite of many bloggers as it provides easy access to all your Analytics data and profiles from your desktop. It’s attractive and extremely useful if you use Analytics on a regular basis. (You can also get Google Trends on your desktop with XeGTrends)

Media Defender Attacks Revision3 with a DDOS

June 5, 2008 1 Comment

One of the best things about the internet is free media. Whether it’s a podcast, vlog, or even a Creative Commons ebook, I love being able to access other people’s works on any device or platform. One of the most awesome free media companies out there is Revision3. These guys make shows like Diggnation, Tekzilla, and The Totally Rad Show and put them up in tons of formats for absolutely no charge. Sure they have ads and sponsors, but not six minute blocks like broadcast television.

Some of the shows, like Diggnation, have become so popular that they are now available in HD for those who like to watch it on their High-Def screens. One could download these directly off the server, but, due to their size, the most efficient way to distribute these HD files is with BitTorrent. That’s right, BitTorrent, the protocol that pirates use to distribute and receive their illegal materials. It also happens to be a perfectly legitimate technology and companies like Revision3 are some of the first to make strides in legitimizing it.

Another company, Media Defender, is in the business of disrupting P2P networks like BitTorrent and help flag users who are distributing the works of others. This may sound innocuous, but their tactics completely target the technology at work, not the media being traded. Their toolkit includes seeding networks with false files and initiating Denial of Service attacks (or DoS) on piracy networks. What is a DoS, you ask? Well the networking lingo is over my head, but essentially one computer overwhelms another with an unceasing flow of packets that use all of the victim’s available resources. Once this occurs, the network (often the server supporting a website) fails.

If you haven’t connected all the dots yet, here’s the rest:

The Revision3 team detected some weirdly associated SYN packets and tried to de-authorize them. Instead of breaking the connection, thousands of SYN packets started pouring in (they estimate 8000/second) to reconnect with their target files. In short order this brought down the site and service didn’t resume for several days. After a quick investigation, it came to light that the offending packets were coming from none other than Media Defender and that they were utilizing a security hole in the server port related to BitTorrent trackers.

The full details and official response are available directly from Revision3’s blog, but this is clearly an unacceptable offense. Revision3 wanted to give their customers as many ways to obtain their free content as possible and a company like Media Defender (often in the pay of the RIAA and the MPAA) has no right to interrupt that service. It appears that the attack may have been either unplanned or unintentional, but since DoS attacks are illegal in the United States, the FBI has been called in to investigate. I wonder if Media Defender will have its servers raided for a change.

In any event, I hope that this is the last DoS attack on Rev3. My iPhone starts to shake when it doesn’t get a fix of Diggnation every week.

PNG Alpha Transparency in Internet Explorer

November 21, 2007 8 Comments

Most casual web developers (and a fair number of professional developers) use JPEG or GIF images on the web, but there is another contender out there: PNG, which stands for Portable Network Graphics.

Why use PNG?

Better compression without loss of quality (i.e., you don’t get those weird "artifacts" that show up when you crunch a JPEG image)
Larger color palette than GIF
It’s open source!

Alpha Transparency

Probably the most exciting part about PNG files is that they support full alpha transparency. What does this mean? Well, with a GIF image, you can knock out a specific color and have transparency. With a PNG image you can do that, plus you can choose to have elements be semi-transparent.

Here are two example images. Note: this is simulated, but these are the kind of effects you could achieve:

Simulated GIF Effect

Simulated PNG Effect

But what about Internet Explorer?

This is obviously a huge boost to web design, but the problem, as is often the case, is Internet Explorer. Prior to IE7, IE did not support alpha transparency. You could use PNG images and get all the other perks, but it would substitute a light grayish color in place of your transparency.

Every other major browser from the last few years could handle PNG alpha transparency, but unless you wanted to have duplicate versions of your site, one with PNGs and a simpler version of the design with GIFs for IE, most developers avoided PNG images. However, there has been a solution under our noses the whole time that I recently discovered: AlphaImageLoader Filter.

The AlphaImageLoader Filter

AlphaImageLoader is a proprietary IE function, and with it, you can utilize alpha transparency in PNG files. All you do is insert some code into your image tag, and presto, instant transparency support. This example is for a graphic of a smiley face that is 200px by 250px, where PATH represents the path to the image file:

<img src="PATH" alt="Smiley Face" width="200" height="250" style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='PATH',sizingMethod='scale');" />

Basically, this little bit of faux-CSS coding loads the filter and processes the image before displaying it. Note that you must specify a height and width for the area that the image will fill (this is known in CSS as a "bounding box"). However, if you always write valid code, you will have included this information already.

Customizing AlphaImageLoader

You have a few options with this filter to control how IE processes the image. These are especially useful if you are using PNG files to create a transparent background for an element. If you put the following words as the value for "sizingMethod" you will get the following effects:

crop: this crops off the edges of the image that don’t fit into the bounding box
image: this is the default, and resizes the bounding box to fit the image
scale: this scales (up or down) the image to fit the bounding box

The Catch

Unsurprisingly, this is not a piece of valid CSS, and if you put this in your document, it will no longer validate properly. The solution? Conditional Comments. As I explained in a previous post, you can use another piece of proprietary IE functionality to hide the offending, IE-specific coding from other browsers and the W3C validation tools. I would suggest moving the information out of the actual HTML tag and into an external CSS file that you could pull up in IE only. Here’s what that might look like:

iefix.css

STYLENAME { filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader (src='PATH',sizingMethod='scale'); }

from the head section of your HTML file

<link href="stylesheets/styles.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> 

Overall, PNG images are the way to go, and as we move farther and farther into faster loading web sites that need to look just as slick as print media, you’ll find that PNG images can fulfill those needs. And now that you’re equipped with this little trick, your your new designs will be supported by all the modern browsers.

Check out the official documentation about the AlphaImageLoader filter from Microsoft’s site.

Conditional Comments for Internet Explorer

November 13, 2007 14 Comments

If you have been writing code for web sites for some time, you will have noticed that Internet Explorer is notoriously strange in its rendering behavior. If you write valid, clean code, your site will likely look nearly identical in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Netscape Navigator, Opera, and Camino, but when you pull it up in IE, suddenly your layout is askew.

The old model was to use JavaScript or another scripting language to determine the user’s browser, and deliver content/styles appropriately. However, there has been another solution in place since IE5, which is some simple proprietary Microsoft tags called Conditional Comments.

Here is a simple example:

1 

And here is how it works.

Because Conditional Comments start off with a “<!–” (line 1) and end with a “–>” (line 3), non-IE browsers simply ignore what is inside the tags, which means that your HTML will still validate without error. Only versions of IE5+ have the ability to parse what is inside the comment tags.

In addition to the simple “Is this IE?” check, you have a variety of options to better narrow your filtering. You can specify:

a specific version of IE (<!–[if IE7]> or <!–[if IE5.5]>)
only versions of IE prior to or after a specific version (<!–[if
lt IE7]> or <!–[if gt IE5]>)
and more complicated expressions utilizing the standard IF
expression tools (AND, OR, NOT, etc.)

What about IF…ELSE statements?

If you want to set up an IF…ELSE situation, the official Conditional
Comments documentation offers this solution:

1  4  5 CONTENT/STYING THAT IS SPECIFIC TO NON-INTERNET EXPLORER BROWSERS 6 

The extra “<!–>” in line 4 and “<!–” in line 6 hides the IE-specific tags from non-IE browsers, but allows the coding inside to be parsed by the browser. If you load the page in IE, the “!IE” conditional will cause it to skip over the entire expression, and so IE will not parse what is inside. Most importantly, because the IE-specific tags are commented out, your site will still pass W3C validation. Although this is a slightly complicated bit of coding, it does provide a solid workaround for IF…ELSE statements.

So what are the drawbacks?

The main drawback is that Conditional Comments can only be used in HTML, not in an external CSS file. However, there are many ways to still use Conditional Comments to your benefit. For example, you could easily set up a supplemental CSS file for Internet Explorer and then use Conditional Comments to call up that CSS file:

<link href="stylesheets/styles.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> 

Overall, Conditional Comments represent a simple alternative to other browser-sniffing methods when all you want to do is identify IE, especially if you are just trying to put an IE CSS/HTML workaround in place.

To read the full, official documentation about Conditional Comments,
check out Microsoft’s site.