Knowledge Work

A fine-tuned Windows XP PC can run quite fast even it’s seriously lacking in the memory and CPU department. Before you chuck out your PC to buy a new one, try stripping some of the rust that’s built-up over the years; the results may surprise you.

It’s probably your operating system that’s slow, not the PC. It’s software, not hardware - you know, invisible 1s and 0s held in an electric field representing your data. Your computer is still fast, but there’s a ton of stuff slowing it down. There’s more 1s where there should be 0s and your PC is killing itself fighting an impossible battle to burn off this fat.

We’ve seen Pentium II machines with 128 MB RAM run XP faster than Pentium IVs with 4x the clock speed and 4x the RAM - so what gives? This article will help you figure out why your PC is running slow and outline exact steps to fix it quickly, before throwing in the towel with a format, restore, or new PC purchase.

Tweak3D.net - Windows XP 15 Minute Tune-Up

Hat tip: Lifehacker

Responsible education reformers know that throwing money at the problems of poor schools and underperforming students doesn’t work.

Sun Microsystems’ retired CEO Scott McNealy has a new idea: leverage the power of open-source tools and software to make high-quality instructional material available to the world’s students for free.

“Math hasn’t changed since Isaac Newton,” declares Scott McNealy. So why, he asks, is California paying some $400 million annually to “update” grade-school textbooks?

That’s just one of the practices questioned by the Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) chairman. And one of the problems he believes can be solved.

McNealy, who handed Sun’s chief executive reins to Jonathan Schwartz earlier this year, is now applying his know-how to steer the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC). That’s a non-profit entity, spun off from Sun in January, which aims to make open-source software available to the world’s kids for free–just as Sun sought to distribute its Solaris operating system (OS) and other wares to businesses, for profit.

Sun’s McNealy Leads Non-Profit Open-Source Drive - Forbes.com

Related: Global Education and Learning Community (GELC)

(Also posted at enrevanche)

It’s important to remember that ITIL is NOT a standard. ITIL has no auditing criteria. Contrary to popular belief ITIL tools cannot be officially regarded as ITIL Compliant. ITIL is a framework of best practice that aims to ensure cost effective, appropriate and quality IT services are delivered. But there’s nothing in ITIL to Audit against. It just wasn’t meant to be that way.

Based totally on BS15000, ISO/IEC 20000 certification and achieving the standard is increasing in popularity, especially in the UK and Europe.

Elsewhere adoption is relatively sparse – but this is subject to change considerably since the ISO released it as ISO/IEC 20000 in December 2005. Now, for the very first time the IT Service Management community has an international standard for auditing and certifying IT Service.

Dr. ITIL - ITIL Guides, Templates, Study Aids, Roadmaps, Implementation Advice and More!: An Introduction To ISO/IEC 20000 - Your Free Guide

We are all told from childhood on that “Patience is a virtue.” And this is largely true. True patience is a combination of disciplined action and disciplined waiting. If we can employ it to the right ends, we can achieve goals and reap rewards that initially seem impossible or unattainable.

In organizational life, however, “patience” is often not patience at all, but rather a cop-out for avoiding meaningful action. People invoke “patience” to rationalize inaction that stems from fear, laziness, or a failure to understand what matters or how to achieve it. If you are driving needed change in your organization and repeatedly hear phrases like “We’ll get to that later,” “The culture won’t support it,” and “There’s no appetite for that yet,” you are not encountering patience. You are encountering complacency. And if you encounter complacency enough times, you can safely conclude you have landed in an organization that tolerates it, or perhaps even encourages it.

Consulting at the Border of Business and Technology - The Work the Line Blog

A survey of U.S. IT executives and business managers released in June by Accenture highlighted how far up the ladder [the Geek/Suit] gap exists.

While 73 percent of responding IT executives said they believe they understand their company’s business extremely or very well, 43 percent of general business managers agreed.

Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of both the IT executives and general business managers agreed that senior business managers only understand how to leverage IT either “somewhat” or “not very/not at all” well.

Geeks Versus Suits: The Great Boardroom Schism

In his satirical new book Rome, Inc.: The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation, Stanley Bing humorously makes the case that the proto-capitalistic Imperium Romanum–with its bold takeovers, power-mad CEOs, and compelling brand–was the beta version of the globe-spanning Microsofts, General Electrics, and IBMs of today. Or perhaps more accurately, the Enrons and WorldComs of yesterday. While Rome Inc. had a great multicentury run, eventually it went out of business. One wonders if the feckless Emperor Honorius, watching the Visigoths coming over the seventh hill in A.D. 410, truly realized that the Roman Empire was about to fall.

Granted, IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano doesn’t have to contend with Visigoths, Vandals, and other pesky barbarians. But like any modern CEO, he does have to deal with flash mob protests by antiglobalization advocates, company-bashing websites, protectionist legislation, and a high-velocity, Internet-connected world where the burgeoning Chinese and Indian economies spawn both profitable market opportunities and lethal competitors.

To succeed in this challenging global environment, Palmisano contends, IBM should be the last multinational corporation. Don’t panic, Big Blue shareholders: He’s talking evolution here, not extinction. In recent essays for the Financial Times newspaper and Foreign Affairs magazine, Palmisano went public with his big-think idea: The era of the multinational corporation is coming to a close.

USNews.com: IBM chief on the global role of corporations

When it comes to parceling out the money, IT is the first to be fired and the last to be hired:

Organisations are not increasing their IT investment at the same rate the business is growing, according to a study by Gartner.

But IT budgets are also harder hit and more negatively affected by a fall in company revenue, Gartner found.

The analysis of nearly 900 companies worldwide compared actual and planned IT spending patterns against revenue during the past three years.

It found that even in organisations with sales growth of 10 per cent the IT budget increases remained at five per cent or less.

Silicon.com: IT Budgets Lag Behind Business Growth (Related: Gartner Group press release, 14 July 2006).

Message: If you’re in the Information Technology sector, you need to understand how your IT department aligns with your organization’s business goals, and you’d better be able to articulate and prove the value that you’re providing.

Go get yourself some ITIL training.

Over at the TECHWR-L list, one of the members is getting set to deliver a talk on technical writing as a career to a group of home-schooled high school students, and asked for advice.

After answering the questions, I realized I had just written a pretty good blog post!

1. What students can learn now to help them prepare

Read everything you can get your hands on, and not just technical stuff. A budding tech writer needs to have a broad base of working knowledge. Over and over, you will be asked to come into a new situation cold and quickly become an “instant expert,” learning the process or product well enough to teach others about it.

So keep that cortex limber: be reading and learning all the time.And write. If you can find a good editor to work with, latch on to that person like a barnacle, and write (for publication if you can) as often you can.

2. What colleges are good to attend for this type of work (I know these don’t precisely correspond to those with “technical writing” as a major)?

Attend the *very best* college or university that you can (a) get into and (b) afford; your course of study matters much less than being challenged to write and think by good instructors and having intelligent peers to help you grow intellectually as well.

You don’t have to go to an Ivy League school, but be aware that the resemblance of most colleges these days to actual institutions of higher learning is purely architectural; make sure that you’re getting value for the dollars you and/or your parents are spending.

3. What salary range could they expect?

The STC salary survey provides good guidelines for what starting technical writers make in various parts of the US.

Note that these high school students, should they become tech writers, will be competing with tech writers in offshore locations who make in a range from $10-15K USD per year; to be successful in the long term, tech writers must develop their “soft skills” and also pick areas to work in that are difficult to outsource or offshore.

Getting a well-rounded understanding of the business world is an immense help; take some basic business classes at college, and read the Wall Street Journal at the library or take advantage of the cheap student subscription rates.

Brian Livingston’s “Windows Secrets” newsletter is one of the few industry publications I subscribe to; he’s a no-nonsense techie who keeps abreast of Developments You Should Know About.

Well, here’s a Development You Should Know About: Microsoft has started cramming spyware into their automatic “security” updates, and concerned users now have a great, free alternative to Windows Update:

In my last issue, I reported that Microsoft’s in-house Windows Update routine is now likely to download marketing gimmicks such as Windows Genuine Advantage to your PC. I advised all Windows users, other than novices, to turn off Automatic Updates.

Because promptly patching Windows is vitally important to your security, however, I recommended a trusted, third-party replacement: Shavlik Technologies’ HFNetChkPro, which supports a much wider variety of programs than does Windows Update. The only downside is that the HFNetChkPro software, while priced reasonably at $25 USD per PC, requires a license for a minimum of 5 PCs.

After that newsletter appeared, Shavlik released a stunning improvement on this frustrating situation. The company’s NetChk Protect — which offers antispyware scanning in addition to patch-management — is now completely free for 1 to 10 PCs for one year.

Free Windows Update alternative is released (Windows Secrets)

Related:

• The Security Baseline as of 13 July 2006 (Windows Secrets)
• Shavlik Technologies, LLC
• Shavlik NetChk Protect

A lot of old favorites here, like the Mac-optimized Mozilla browser Camino and the Adium chat client, but a few surprises, too.

BoydCreative » Top 10 Open Source OS X Apps!

“India is a roaring capitalist success story.” So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor. India’s leading business newspaper, The Economic Times, summed up the general euphoria over the event in its regular feature, “The Global Indian Takeover”: “For India, it is a harbinger of things to come — economic superstardom.”

This sounds persuasive as long as you don’t know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia’s imminent economic superstardom.

The Myth of the New India - New York Times (Op-Ed, July 6, 2006)

Guest editorialist Pankaj Mishra goes on to point out that India’s per capita GDP is only slightly greater than that of sub-Saharan Africa, and “only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy.”

Jerry Toomer retired from a 25-year career at Dow Chemical in 2003. But today he’s back at work, having found a consulting job through an employment network designed specifically for older adults, YourEncore.com.

‘I don’t see myself as a retiree,’ says Mr. Toomer, a 57-year-old organizational-development expert in Indianapolis. As part of his new responsibilities, ‘I did a very interesting project where I helped the company foster innovation in its leading-edge R&D group,’ he says. ‘A great use of my expertise.’

Faced with the prospect of millions of retiring baby boomers, companies across the country, including Eli Lilly & Co., Procter & Gamble Co. and Boeing Co., are increasingly eager to lure back to the work force retirees with decades of experience in their chosen fields. But finding the right candidates has been tricky, with most companies relying on personal connections to locate willing older workers.

Online employment networks spring up for 55-plus crowd (The Wall Street Journal, via “Construction)

I haven’t used a Mac regularly since 1996, but about a month ago I found myself in a techno-trance state, in the Apple Store in SoHo, New York City, swiping my AmEx card to buy one of the new Intel-based MacBooks.

(I was driven screaming back into the arms of Apple by a hauntingly awful experience with a late public beta of Microsoft Vista. I’ve transitioned quickly in the last few weeks to using the MacBook as my primary work machine, and I haven’t looked back.)

My new MacBook 1.83Ghz (512MB RAM, 60GB HD, $1099 at the Apple Store in NYC) arrived ready to go right out of the box. It was unusually well-equipped with pre-loaded software; not just a Web browser (Safari), e-mail client (Mail) and a host of related tools, but a licensed copy of Apple’s powerful and cool iLife multimedia suite, plus 30-day trial versions of iWork and Microsoft Office 2004.

From the time I broke the seal on the box and unpacked the cute little beast, I was up and running in about ten minutes… the first clue that I was in for an experience that was very, very different from my last ten years in the Wintel Wilderness.

That being said, if you are of the geekly inclination, you’re going to want to make some additional tweaks and purchases to optimize your Mac-using experience, especially if you have to continue to collaborate with colleagues who are tethered to their Windows machines. So with that in mind, here’s what I’ve learned in the first month of owning a new Intel-based Mac and fitting it out so that I can still work with my Windows peeps.

(Muchas gracias to long-time Mac user and old friend Chap of Chapomatic for helping me identify and select some key downloads and purchases for my new toy… er, tool. Thanks also to Take Control Books, whose inexpensive e-books Take Control of Switching to the Mac and Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac were invaluable aids and worth five or ten times the $15 I paid for the pair in time saved and frustration prevented. )

PROTECTION

I almost never purchase the extended warranty on any electronic item I buy, but I make an exception for laptops. The three-year AppleCare package for a MacBook runs $349, or just a tad over $115 a year (not quite $10 a month, about 32 cents a day, etc.) Just do it.

And while you’re at it, check out your homeowners or renters insurance policy to see what kinds of electronics coverage you’ve got; you might want to call Safeware for a price quote as well (replacement-cost insurance coverage for my MacBook for one year, covering theft and all kinds of damage that AppleCare won’t: $51.)

As for the other kinds of protection a migrating Windows user might be worried about–anti-virus, anti-spyware, and so forth–fuhgeddabouddit. OS X comes with a built-in firewall, which I recommend that you turn on, but as for viruses and spyware, they basically do not exist in the wild in the OS X world (yet.)

For the truly paranoid among you (I can relate!), download ClamXav, a shareware antivirus tool for the Mac, which allows on-demand scanning of files and folders… and use your PayPal account to toss a few pounds sterling to Mark Allan, the nice English fellow who writes and maintains it.

PIMP MY MACBOOK: RAM EDITION

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM. If you didn’t buy the maxed-out version of your MacBook, the good news is that you can add third-party RAM (fully compliant with Apple specs) for a fraction of the cost that Apple will charge you.

2GB of MacBook-compatible RAM from the incredibly nice people at Small Dog Electronics ran me about $225 with tax and shipping, a significant savings over the $500+ that Apple charges; installation took ten minutes and a small Phillips-head screwdriver, and was actually a breeze even for a mechanical klutz like myself. Just download, print and follow the simple RAM installation directions on Apple’s web site (PDF link.)

The increased performance you’ll experience when you max out your memory is hard to believe. (RAM is a user-replaceable part on the MacBooks, and upgrading your RAM does not void your warranty.)

WRITING AND PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS

I write for a living, so this is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart.

If you want to share documents with colleagues in the Windows world, you’re going to want to bite the bullet and pony up for a licensed copy of Microsoft Office 2004 for Macintosh. It’s not optimized for Intel processors (yet) but it runs okay on the new Intel-based Macs, and it’s pretty much a must if you have to collaborate on documents with folks who use other versions of Office on other platforms. (Unlike the Windows and Linux versions, the free and open-source OpenOffice is not something I can recommend on the Mac side; it feels clunky and unreliable, and even the Mac-specific builds like NeoOffice are Not There Yet in my opinion.)

Suggested retail price for the full version of Mac Office 2004 is $499 (ouch), but the “Student and Teacher Edition,” which you can qualify for if you or anyone in your household is, well, a student or teacher, is widely available for a street price of $140 or less, sometimes a lot less; there’s a $50 rebate going on right now that brings the price to around $80 at some outlets. (Hint: The “Student and Teacher” version, which allows installation on up to three machines, is widely available online, e.g. on eBay and Amazon.com; even though I actually qualify for it through my continuing education teaching gigs, nobody demanded to see an ID or proof of eligibility at any point in the purchase or registration process… nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

If you’re a hard-core writer or blogger, for actual day-to-day text editing and word processing use, you’re probably going to want something a little nicer, more Intel-optimized, and muscular than Microsoft Word. As nice as iWork’s “Pages” program is, my preferred option is actually Nisus Writer Express, a $70 powerhouse available in an Intel-optimized version, that Just Works for a bevy of writing tasks.

In addition to being a very competent and affordable word processor, Nisus Writer Express has a bunch of power-user features that geeks will love, including a built-in Perl interpreter and a well thought-out graphical interface (“PowerFind Pro”) to GREP, an incredibly feature-rich search-and-replace tool. It’s screaming-fast, supports a wide variety of file formats (though in my experience, complex Word documents that rely heavily on styles don’t always transfer well) and is just generally a pleasure to use; I’m writing this blog entry in Nisus Writer Express right now.

If you present ideas for a living, you should also take a hard look at OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, two very powerful programs from The Omni Group. OmniGraffle is a diagramming tool, like a Mac version of Visio (the Pro version reads Visio XML output, kinda-sorta; complicated Visio diagrams will require a fair bit of reformatting.) And as for OmniOutliner, I haven’t enjoyed using an outlining tool so much since the days of the late lamented MORE in the early 1990s.

All Omni products are available for separate purchase; the “Omni Professional Productivity Bundle,” which includes the professional versions of both OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner as well as a few other tools, runs $225, which I paid without demurral.

COPING WITH WINDOWS

If you’re dependent on Windows programs that are *not* available on the Macintosh side, and you have one of the new Intel-based Macintoshes, you’ll want to download and install Apple’s free Boot Camp (which allows you to choose between OS X and Windows XP at startup) or my preferred solution, Parallels Desktop ($79; on sale for $49 through July 15) which allows you to run Windows (or Linux, or just about any OS that runs on Intel) in a Macintosh window.

Both Boot Camp and Parallels require you to supply a legal copy of Microsoft Windows XP, as well as your own Windows software. I use Parallels with a copy of XP SP2, and run programs like Microsoft Visio and Project with no difficulty at all.

Remember that even a virtual Windows session is prone to viruses, spyware, and the like; you’ll want to protect your Windows partition or virtual disk just like a regular Windows machine.

Oh, and if you need to keep your address book, to-do-list and calendar synchronized between and among multiple machines on multiple different platforms, give Plaxo a look. $49 a year for Plaxo Premium is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made in the computing world. (Currently, only address book/contact information is synced on the Mac.)

BASIC UTILITIES TO BUY

In alphabetical order, a few things you’ll want to pick up:

• Audio Hijack Pro - capture and record any audio source you can play on your Mac; includes timer and automation features, making it not unlike a TiVo for streaming audio. $32 from Rogue Amoeba.
• The aforementioned shareware anti-virus tool ClamXav; donation to Mark Allan Software at your discretion (I chipped in GBP 5, or about $9.25 US; hey, big spender!)
• GraphicConverter - convert, tweak and resize graphics from one format to another; a must-have. $30 from Lemke Software.
• Fetch - great, easy to use FTP/SFTP client for the Mac; $25 from Fetch Softworks.

GREAT FREE STUFF

In alphabetical order, a few things you’ll want to download and install:

• Adium - Multi-platform chat (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google) for the Mac.
• Audacity - Free, open-source audio editor. Yes, the Mac ships with GarageBand, and there are other audio tools available, but I put out a podcast for quite some time using Audacity and I’ve grown accustomed to, and comfortable with, it.
• Camino - The web browser of choice for the Mac; a Macintosh-optimized version of Mozilla.
• Handbrake - DVD to MPEG ripper/converter (see also: Mac The Ripper.)
• Nvu - Free, powerful HTML editor.
• QuickSilver - A ‘launcher’ program, but so much more; I am just beginning to scratch the surface of what can be accomplished with this powerful tool, which basically learns the way you work on your Mac and helps you find files, launch programs and perform combinations of the two (e.g., “e-mail this file I just found to my friend Chap”) with stunning speed.
• TextWrangler - Free, versatile text editor from the folks at Bare Bones Software, who make the excellent BBEdit.

Gliffy is easy, free, and fun!

• Diagramming in your web browser without downloading additional software
• Similar to Visio, yet in your web browser
• Desktop application feel in a web-based diagramming solution
• Add collaborators to your work and watch it grow
• Link to published Gliffy drawings from your blog or wiki
• Create many types of diagrams:
• Flowcharts
• UI wireframes
• Floor plans
• Network diagrams
• Any simple drawing or diagram

Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online.

…EXIN has launched a new Service Quality Management Certificate based on ISO 20000. This Foundation Certificate in Service Quality Management will also become part of a new learning track for the Service Quality Management consultant.

This track consists of ITIL Foundation, Service Quality Management Foundation, a new ITIL Service and Process Improvement certificate and a new Advanced certificate in Service Quality Management. In this track the Manager’s Certificate in IT Service Management can be used instead of ITIL Service and Process Improvement.

Well, I must say I’m enjoying the new MacBook. I still have a need to run a few Windows programs (Visio, Project), and so for the first few days this week I experimented with Apple’s BootCamp. This is a perfectly satisfactory solution, as long as you don’t mind shutting down and rebooting whenever you need to access something in Windows.

But when I ramped up the MacBook’s RAM this week to 2GB (thanks, Small Dog Electronics — $225 with shipping is a much better deal than the $500 that Apple charges for the identical sticks of memory), I had enough overhead to play with virtual machines.

So I downloaded and installed Parallels Desktop (just formally released; on sale for $49 through July.) Parallels allows you to run Windows XP (or any Windows OS, or Linux, or pretty much anything that runs on an Intel chip) in a window on your Mac, while your other Mac software putters along happily. Does it work? Yes, it does:

A new Outlook on Macintosh computing

That’s Windows XP in a Mac window, with Windows Outlook downloading my company e-mail and showing my calendar for the week. The performance is admittedly much less snappy than BootCamp, which is, after all, running Windows natively on a fast Intel processor.

But it’s perfectly adequate for occasionally starting up XP and tweaking a Visio document or a Project plan, and as I get a little better at adjusting the settings to find the configuration’s “sweet spot,” it is improving all the time.

Vista. The term stirs the imagination to conceive of beautiful possibilities just around the corner. And “just around the corner” is what Windows Vista has been, and has remained, for the past two years. In this time, Vista has suffered a series of high-profile delays, including most recently the announcement that it would be delayed until 2007. The largest software project in mankind’s history now threatens to also be the longest.

Admittedly, this essay would be easier written for Slashdot, where taut lines divide the world crisply into black and white. “Vista is a bloated piece of crap,” my furry little penguin would opine, “written by the bumbling serfs of an evil capitalistic megalomaniac.” But that’d be dead wrong. The truth is far more nuanced than that. Deeper than that. More subtle than that.

I managed developer teams in Windows for five years, and have only begun to reflect on the experience now that I have recently switched teams. Through a series of conversations with other leaders that have similarly left The Collective, several root causes have emerged as lasting characterizations of what’s really wrong in The Empire…

The World As Best As I Remember It: Broken Windows Theory

(via Metafilter)

Many independent developers eventually find themselves in a situation where they must negotiate a contract for the first time, such as for a publishing deal. And many developers are taken advantage of on their first deal because of a lack of basic negotiating skills.

This article will attempt to give you a general understanding of how to negotiate a fair deal. The first thing you must learn are the three variables of negotiation: time, information, and power. You can remember these easily with the acronym ‘TIP,’ so the next time you have to negotiate an agreement, you’ll remember the ‘TIP’ to think in terms of time, information, and power.

Basic Negotiating for Fun and Profit (Steve Pavlina)

If you’ve just been appointed technical lead (of anything), take ten minutes to read this.

Perhaps the most difficult job to do on any software development project is that of Technical Lead. The Technical Lead has overall responsibility for all technical aspects of the project - design, code, technology selection, work assignment, scheduling and architecture are all within his purview. Positioned right at the border of the technical and managerial, they are the proverbial “meat in the sandwich.” This means that they have to be able to speak two languages - the high-level language of the project manager to whom they report, and the low-level technical language of their team. In effect, they’re the translator between the two dialects.

Observation suggests that there are not that many senior techies who have the skills and personal characteristics necessary to perform the Technical Lead role well. Of those I have seen attempt it, perhaps ten percent did a good job of it, twenty percent just got by, and the remaining seventy percent screwed it up. Therefore most of what I have learnt about being a good Technical Lead has been learnt by counter-example. Each time I see a Technical Lead doing something stupid, I make a mental note to avoid that same behavior or action when I am next in the Technical Lead role.

Hacknot - Great Mistakes in Technical Leadership

When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company’s president went online to check on a promising candidate who had just graduated from the University of Illinois.

At Facebook, a popular social networking site, the executive found the candidate’s Web page with this description of his interests: “smokin’ blunts” (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex, all described in vivid slang.

It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done.

“A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have?” said the company’s president, Brad Karsh. “Why are you allowing this to be viewed publicly, effectively, or semipublicly?”

For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé - New York Times

I recently interviewed a fresh-out-of-college candidate who was mildly surprised that I had Googled him prior to our talk and knew a few things that weren’t on his résumé. But he was absolutely floored when he found out that I had also found his MySpace page (yeah, even us old farts have them.)

Unlike the NY Times story, this one has a happy ending: the kid’s online presence had no damning information in it, but much that was of interest; it provided some great conversational pegs for the interview.

Blogs and other online personas can work for you or against you in the world of work. Be careful about what you’re putting out there.