The Virtual Handshake Blog

Archive for September, 2008

Email Etiquette and Productivity

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

For all the popularity of blogging, social networking, Twitter, etc., email is still the killer app (or at least the workhorse app) for building and maintaining relationships virtually.
And yet, so many people use it so ineffectively, or at least so much less effectively than they could.
I was recently interviewed, along with with several other experts [...]

If Ever a Video Deserved Millions of Hits…

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

…this one does. This is from the opening ceremony of the Dallas ISD kickoff meeting for teachers, staff and administrators.

All I can say is "Amen!"
I have hope for the future of America.

Jason Fried, 37Signals, at the NY Web 2.0 Expo

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

My notes from Jason Fried of 37Signals at the NY Web 2.0 Expo:
Software business is a great place to be . You can build anything you want. Don”t have to worry about physics, raw materials, regulation, cost of change, geographic locale
You do have to worry about some issues most people don”t worry about:
- lack [...]

Digg, icanhascheezburger, InstantAction, FakeSteveJobs at NY Web 2.0 Expo

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Following are my notes on the Friday keynotes from the NY Web 2.0 Expo
Jay Adelson, founder, Digg
We”re about to add 90m Facebook users as registered Digg users.
Collaborative filters are key to monetizing of social networks
Ben Huh, icanhazcheezburger.com
LOLcats started out in primordial soup of the internet.
Every piece of web 2.0 content came from a user.
In 4/07, [...]

Josh Schachter: Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

One of the best speakers at the NY Web 2.0 Expo was Josh Schachter of delicious, who spoke on Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems:
BACKGROUND
Built delicious in 2003, sold to Yahoo in 2005. I just left Yahoo a few months ago.
Billions of page views/month.
4m users at time of sale
3 kinds of scale: [...]

Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.tv on entrepreneurship at the NY Web 2.0 Expo

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.tv was a *very* passionate speaker about entrepreneurship at the NY Web 2.0 Expo, although his style is definitely not one that everyone can emulate. My notes:
PP = patience and passion
“Please stop doing stuff you hate. You can lose just as much money being happy as hell.”
I took my parents” [...]

Actions Speak Louder Than Words, Even Virtually

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

It’’s an old cliche, but it still holds true, even in the virtual world.
One of the things we discovered in the process of researching The Virtual Handshake is that one of the best ways to build strong relationships with other people is to help them actually get something done. Small talk is cheap. Actually [...]

Personal Virtual Hubs

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

I know there are quite a few people reading this blog who, like me, have several different virtual points of presence. The challenge I’m having is that no single one of them really feels like “me” – all just “a part of me”.
This site (TheVirtualHandshake.com) and my consulting site (LinkToYourWorld.com) are both shared with [...]

Maximizing LinkedIn and Other Online Networks - Teleclass 9/22

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

If you”re reading this blog, odds are that you”re already familiar with LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. But what I constantly get asked, even from people who have been participating in these sites for a while, is, “How do I use these to generate real business?”
It’’s easy enough to set up a [...]

Scott Allen Interview on XtremeRecruiting.tv

Monday, September 15th, 2008

I had a fun experience last week — my first virtual video interview.
Bill Vick, who I had the pleasure of working with on LinkedIn for Recruiting, interviewed me via Skype for XtremeRecruiting.tv, his video blog "about the collision of recruitment and technology". We talked about the importance of interpersonal skills ("soft skills") even in virtual [...]