Onward and Upward

Well, this is going to be my last post for a short while.

As many of you know, a new baby is due to come into my life any day now. This marks a turning point for me in many ways. A new life is beginning, and I'm about to enter a new phase of my own life. This has made me think a lot about what I'm doing and where I'm heading, but more about that later.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to upgrade my blog. I'm finding that Blogger has outlived its usefulness for me. I need a lot more flexibility and some more powerful features for what I want to do. When I return I'll still be blogging at jjprojects.net, so please stay tuned for developments. I'll be archiving this blog when I make the change.

I'll let you know when I'm about to kick things off again, it shouldn't be too long. I'll certainly be maintaining existing posts here in the meantime, if any of you would like to leave responses to existing posts. I will still read them and contribute.

During my blogging hiatus you will still find me twittering, facebooking, flickring, SLing...

Thanks for your patience and I'll be back bigger and better soon enough.

jj

Respecting The Snacker

Do I respect the media snacker? Hmmm, that's a good question. It has been asked of me by Connie Reece, and was first posed by Jeremiah Owyang.

So what is a media snacker? Jeremiah has defined media snackers as "Folks who consume small bits of information, data or entertainment when, where, and how they want. If you want to be part of their lives you’ve got to respect them."

I'm certainly guilty of writing the odd long blog post or three. I could do more to make my posts shorter and to the point. I do think there is still a place for longer posts though, if they are well researched and well thought out. People are still prepared to read longer articles on particular subjects they are really interested in, if they have the time.

Having said that, I've become quite a media snacker myself. I'm a heavy user of both Twitter and Facebook, and I tend not to use my RSS reader as much as I used to. I tend to jump to blog posts, video, audio and images as people post them on Twitter and Facebook. I might leave a quick comment on their blog, flickr or Facebook wall when I do.

I'm a lot more prepared to listen to longer audio podcasts than other media, as it's easier to multitask while listening. I don't have a regular podcast (yet), but if or when I do, I think I'll try to keep my recordings on the short side if I can. Famous last words.

In the interests of extending the conversation, I'd be interested to know how this group of people respond to the question, if they feel so inclined:

Laurel Papworth, Steven Lewis, Joseph Jaffe, Bryan Person, Cheryl Lead, Cameron Reilly, Nick Hodge. Cathleen Ritt, Andrea Vascellari

Here is a cross-section of some of the other people who have responded to the question so far: Chris Brogan, Connie Bensen, Clay Newton, Lee Hopkins

If you'd like to respond to the question too, or to what I've said, please feel free to leave a comment. I'd love to see what you've got to say.

Twitter is faster than Google!

I want to say a few words about how I've discovered that asking Twitter can be faster than searching Google, if you want a question answered.

As my Twitter network has grown (currently 378 followers), I've come to rely on Twitter more and more. Nowadays, if I have a question about just about anything, and especially anything tech, I'll ask Twitter first. Then I might turn to Google to search, while Twitter is pondering the answer.

Usually I don't get far past bringing up the search window before I have several great answers from Twitter, and then a few minutes later there will be many more. Sometimes it even sparks a discussion on the topic. You just can't beat that. As I keep saying, Twitter is faster than Google.

Trust the twitter, the twitter knows all. The wisdom of crowds.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Got any good examples of this?

The Connections Show Conversation

A few weeks ago I had a recorded Skype conversation with Stan Relihan, the host of The Connections Show on The Podcast Network. The episode has now gone live and can be found here.

The Connections Show examines how to use social networking tools to build a business network. Stan is an executive recruiter and I think I can safely say he is Australia's foremost Linkedin user. He asked me to explain Twitter and to discuss how I use Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools.

Please feel free to leave a comment on the show blog, and If you think the conversation is interesting enough to share with others, please go ahead and digg the episode from the show blog.

I hope you enjoy listening to the show, I enjoyed the conversation with Stan. Like me, he is enthusiastic about social media.

Soon To Be Father

This is off topic but I just want to let you know about this guest blog post I wrote for Adam Purcell's blog wherestheinstructions.com. It's a blog about his experiences of being a new dad. He asked me to contribute a few thoughts on being an expectant father.

Not long to wait now! We're up to 38 weeks.

Post Sydney Tweetup 2.0

It's taken me a while to get around to uploading my photos from the Sydney tweetup (STUB) back on the 27 Sept; sorry, I've been pretty busy since then. Here they are at last, funny captions are encouraged. If you have any more photos you'd like to show, please leave a link to them in the comments. Check out this video shot at the event too. Nick Hodge was handling the camera.

It was really good to see that a few more women came along this time. We also had some people from out of town, as the tweetup purposely coincided with a couple of other tech events going on in Sydney that week. It was great to see a few people there who had only just started twittering.

A big thanks goes out to those who helped organise the evening, and to all those who came along. It was a fun night. Thanks to Greg Dwyer and Markus Hafner (aka eskimo_sparky) from Happener Recruitment, and to Nick Hodge from Microsoft for their continued support of the event. My thanks also goes out to co-organiser Ajay Ranipeta (aka funkycoda). He has a lot of enthusiasm for encouraging and organising these kinds of events.

Microsoft supplied the food and a couple of copies of Vista as prizes for the best tweets of the night. Happener supplied the delicious beverages 2.0, and Twitter (the company) supplied a few "wearing my twitter shirt" t-shirts to give away as well. Thanks to Jack Dorsey from Twitter for coming through with the goods there.