Dumpling in a Hanky

After receiving yet another LinkedIn contact request from a complete stranger (with the accompanying over-eager email from LinkedIn a few days later, saying "hey, this connection request is still  waiting!!), I asked friends on Twitter: Why do people ask to connect on LinkedIn when they don't know you, and have never met you? There was a variety of responses from people about their reaction to these requests, but the majority response was definitely one of annoyance. In the end, I came to the conclusion that interactions on LinkedIn are a lot like dating. Now, having had my fair share of dates and dating-related interactions both online and in person, I thought I'd help out by giving a couple of etiquette tips for LinkedIn, and also for life generally (and dating). If you want to get to know me, spend some time on it So many times on LinkedIn, I get a generic "X wants to connect" request. No information about why they think they'd like to con...

Late last month, I got a bit of an unpleasant surprise when I came home to find the front of my house covered in scaffolding. My first thought was that was that something was seriously and suddenly structurally wrong with my house, and the council had put it up as an emergency measure. Having checked the frontage, it was clear there were no big chunks falling off, so it wasn't the council. Maybe it was my neighbours - we'd agreed a few months before to have some work done on our adjoining building fronts, so perhaps it was them, and they'd either forgotten to mention it to me, or they had had a unexpected chance to get scaffolding and do the work at short notice (they run a construction company). But I checked...it wasn't them. Which left the option of the scaffolders being idiots, and confusing my house (on X Road) with the same house (on X Loan), or....someone putting scaffold on for an unknown reason! Luckily, after I went round to see the owners of the house on X Lo...

I think it's almost standard now that most types of professionals these days have a LinkedIn profile. It effectively works as an online CV, allowing contacts to easily review your skills and experience, and lets you gather many disparate facts about you into one place, such as your non-work skills and experience. One element of the LinkedIn offering is that colleagues and contacts can "endorse" your skills, allowing you to build up a list of your abilities that have been verified by others. On the face of it, this is a handy option - people who know you and your skills are able to vouch for you, and allow others to get an unbiased view of what you can actually do. Skills would be selected from a pre-approved range of options. It all sounds sensible, and useful. However, the reality was a little different in practice. It turned out, those pre-defined options were actually quite wide ranging. And in some cases, somewhat odd. I've attached a screenshot of the current...

On the 24th of April, I went along to the National Library of Scotland to attend the SLA Europe event “Meeting, Tweeting and Fb’ing” , which promised to cover topics such as “how useful is social media for libraries? Can Facebook really help me to promote what I do? What benefits can using LinkedIn bring me as an information professional? “ We began with Bryan Christie of the National Library of Scotland (NLS) giving us an overview of the aims and activities of the NLS on social media. The purpose of this approach is to increase the NLS’ digital presence, and raise awareness of the interesting, non-digital materials within its collections, especially to a younger audience. Bryan views a relevant social media presence as being like journalism – you have to find the interesting information. He’s found that posts on Twitter publicising material from the NLS collections is driving traffic to the NLS website, for more information on these materials. Examples of traffic-creating posts o...

Okaaaaaaaaaaay, Thing 6 is it then! Of the various networks suggested, I'm a member of Facebook, LinkedIn, LISPN, and CILIP Communities...please note though, that there's a big difference between me being a member, and me actually participating in all of these! I have to confess up front, that I don't ever actually go onto either LISPN or CILIP Communites. LISPN I signed up to when it was first launched, as I wanted to help build the momentum to get it going, and be involved, but it moved way past me needing to be there as an encouraging body long ago! Also, it's not really a network that I feel I need to be actively involved in at this point - I feel I'm at a stage in my career where I'm experienced, established in my role, and happily settled in my workplace. This means I'm not greatly in need of the resources available there, which are more suited to those moving to/from library school, first/second/third jobs/contracts, and trying to establish pro...

I'm such a copycat: I saw Karen Blakeman's visual LinkedIn network on her blog, and thought I'd see what mine looked like... I've taken out my name at the centre, and the shareable version strips out contact names, but I seem to have 3 separate worlds - orange is workmates, past and present. Blue is personal/real life contacts, green is online/social networks contacts, and pink are library-but not via-social-network contacts. Methinks you can see that work and social/personal don't really overlap in my life, although some of the colour coding, as Karen says, seems to be entirely random. But it's still quite pretty, all swirly and stuff!