Maybe you’re a luddite!
You’ve worked with computers all or most of your professional lives – am I right? You may even like the new toys and gadgets and be a bit of a techie nerd – fewer of you, but still a significant number. However, the biggest single social upheaval, game changing technology has not yet been understood by many; even many computing professionals even though most will not admit it.
You can’t have failed to notice the wave of “Web 2.0″ since around 2004 which was utilising the web as a social mechanism and the resulting confusion with Facebook applications etc; I still hear plenty of coffee room conversations about what a waste of time it is and how people “don’t get it”. Well, the other thing that people don’t “get” yet are professional social sites like linkedin.com – many people have signed up for it, and the early adopters thought it was all about getting the highest number of connections, many had very limited details of who they were and little else but I think that the main point of these sites is to build a rich on-line presence that cannot be easily created overnight but instead evolves over months and years.
The methods of cultivating an on-line presence are varied; I’ve already mentioned linkedin.com for the maintaining an on-line equivalent to a CV, now enriched with genuine client references and recommendations and supplemented with a photograph and links to blogs. All your business connections are kept in one place, groups and communities can be joined and many agents are turning to this and other sites as a rich source of resources.
Some websites don’t seem to get it either; if only prometric.com would allow me to make public my genuine Oracle certifications for everyone to see… I don’t understand why they don’t, or at least why they don’t allow me to choose to make it public! The whole point of these certifications is that some level of understanding has been achieved and in turn gains credibility – I’d be happy for everyone to see mine.
There are many other opportunities for the go-getter; if you’re an expert in a topic (or want to be) contributing to the Oracle forums is a great way, potentially building to a recognised “Oracle Ace”, being involved in the Oracle community for a particular subject area like development or in a module for Oracle Applications. The point is that credibility, history, longevity, connections, recommendations and the like can be built over years bit by bit, because the older the web gets the more and more it will become part of the fabric of everyday life, and once on the web its there forever and it’s very hard to fake it.
