Subscribe to the blog on e-mail

I recently added and tested FeedBlitz to this blog as well as the aside design studio blog.

So for people who aren’t comfortable with RSS [ which is a nisconception I believe - that there are people on the internet, who use the internet and who know what blogs are but don't know what to do with RSS feeds - but that's what the experts say so I thought I might as well make it easy for people who really don't know much about RSS ] – “the subscribe using e-mail” just under the search box on the top right in the sidebar will allow you to subscribe to this blog via FeedBlitz, which will deliver the latest blog posts right into your inbox.

If I don’t see any activity with this feature in three months, I’ll take it down.

Add comment December 12th, 2005

Potential use of OpenLink

I’d been wondering what the advantages of being part of OpenLink would be in one of my earlier posts and within two days of joining/signing up for LinkedIn’s personal Plus, I have exhausted all my ten introductions. This is how I utilized them:

• Since I am in the business of design, it wouldn’t be “good for business” if I got in touch with other designer – in the sense that it wouldn’t bring in any new business – I am connected to many other talented designers and we’re great friends but I really wanted to put Personal Plus to use here! Now unlike openBC, LinkedIn does not provide the option of searching for people based on their “wants” so there is no way that I can directly search for people who “want” design services.
• Thought of one thing that I was involved in currently and realized it was “blogging”.
• Searched for the keyword “blogging” and restricted it to OpenLink members.
• Visited 10 profiles and read them in detail.

Picked up their weblinks and blog links and paid their blogs a visit.

• Found something of interest on their blog [ posts related to LinkedIn, internet technology, blogging, graphics industry, etc. ] and left them a comment.
• Also followed up with an introduction on LinkedIn itself – many of them had their e-mail id’s on their blogs and websites and it would have been awfully easy to send them “Invitations to Connect” instead of “Introductions”. At the same time, it would also have been awfully easy for them to refuse the connection!
• Wrote a brief personalized introduction asking them about their interests and quoting something from their blog/website and told them a bit about myself – the whole time focusing on the keyword “blogging”.

I’ve already had positive replies from three of the ten people [ and have connected networks with them too! ] and have sent out the hence freed-up introductions to three more people.

It’s a wait and watch thing and it will be really sad if I have to withdraw even a single introduction [ maybe LinkedIn should have something like openBC's "Activity Meter" so I know who's been using LinkedIn and who's left the portal ] – but I’ll let you know how it goes!

Add comment December 1st, 2005

Steve Duncan’s blog post on LinkedIn

I had not read Steve’s blog earlier – for one thing, the Personal Plus account membership is definitely making me more proactive! – I was browsing other OpenLink member profiles and I’d seen Steve’s name on the various forums that I’m a member of. He’d also provided a link to his blog from his profile [ I wonder why LinkedIn doesn't provide a space for clickable weblinks - even after they've been hearing this suggestion from loads of members ].

There is this one entry on the blog about Why employees should be encouraged to join LinkedIn where Steve not only goves some compelling answers to that question, but also shares some of his “ground rules” like:

While LinkedIn is a very nifty tool, it’s just that – a tool. It’s not anyone’s life or self esteem. It’s not going to spell success or failure for anyone by itself. Don’t take it too seriously!

Short and sweet!

Add comment November 30th, 2005

Moving/Importing/Exporting the aside Business Networking blog

I recently started blogging on the WordPress blogging platform for the aside design studio blog and have found it to be more functional and with more features to enable me to write a truly professional blog.

Personally, I feel that a good blog is one with good content and the platform does not make much of a difference, but when one can write good content and the platform can contribute to easy manageability as well as aesthetics, why not move to the better platform.

Blogger had indeed made it easy for *anyone* to start blogging but that has also led to splogs and this blog being duplicated and used by someone else – even after repeated complaints to the hosting people [ something called txthub ] and also after alerting Google [ because the duplicate blog is being used for Google AdSense too ] – nothing has been done about it.

WordPress is more secure as far as I have seen – the number of plugins to tweak a WordPress blog are innumerable and also allow for more security and functionality.

The content of this blog will be transferred instantly onto a new WordPress blog but I will not be removing the content from the biznetworking.blogspot.com domain name [ there is no way I can transfer the Google PageRank! ] – hopefully with better content in the future, I will be able to build a better PageRank on the new WordPress blog and will then probably remove content from this domain.

2 comments November 22nd, 2005

Stealing Blogs

I was recently searching for “business networking” blogs on Google and came to a virtual copy of this blog.

Has anyone else ever faced this?
I have written to the e-mail id for support on txthub and am awaiting a reply.

Please let me know if any of you have faced this earlier and how you tackled it. I’d appreciate any information.

3 comments October 5th, 2005