When I wrote about the Wisdom project in October last year, the book wasn’t available in the UK.

But on Saturday, I saw it prominently displayed in the Cambridge branch of Borders. I was utterly enthralled. It is as captivating ‘in the paper’ as it I anticipated from watching the trailer on the project website. The only reason I didn’t buy it immediately was because its a substantial book and I had a fair way to walk with an already-full load of parcels.

But I will be getting it. If you’re interested, you can get it in the UK, here – and the US, here.

One of the finer arts of networking is introducing your contacts to each other, just because they are people they might each want to know. Clearly this is no good at all if there is no clear point of common interest in their professional or personal lives. You need to put some thought into the contact and do it only if there is come clear advantage to both parties.  The best networkers understand that there is huge value in doing something for a colleague, associate, client or supplier – with no expectation of return. That old ‘What goes around, comes around’ adage.

Today I connected up two people on the other side of the world – just because I thought they would be useful contacts in the same industry.
- Karen was our wonderful contact on the Thomson Reuters 360 degree feedback project for about 6 years. She has recently moved back to Sydney and is embarking on an exciting new phase of her career studying psychology and doing some independent career coaching for her past employer.
- David is the Head of HR for a large computer hardware company – also based in Sydney.

Rather than connecting them directly on LinkedIn, I opted to mail them and ask if they would like to be introduced to each other – but I included their public LinkedIn profile links so that they could get a better look at each other’s backgrounds and experience before connecting up. They can then choose whether to meet up for a coffee, just stay in email contact, or extend that to include LinkedIn as well.

We tend to use online tools in the way that others do – I’ve started to think about other ways to use LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to be more effective in different aspects of my life. And I’ve found a number of new ways of using all of them.

Photo credit: dsevilla

The FreeMe Wildlife rehabilitation centre rescues wild animals that have wandered (or been brought) into the urban sprawl of Johannesburg. Increasingly, the burgeoning housing developments in cities all over the world is creating a problem – reducing habitat for wildlife. FreeMe does a great job of housing, feeding and healing animals that otherwise might not survive in the alien environment of the concrete and fences.

The organisation is staffed in part by volunteers.  This week, my sister and her children, who are FreeMe supporters, gave sanctuary to ‘Meatball’, the Leopard Tortoise. Once found, his presence at home was a little fraught because they also have a number of large dogs who might consider him a tasty morsel.

Here’s why:

Its hard to imagine a tortoise could be that small

But definitely not one of your 5-a-day! – despite his size.

In “Terry Pratchett’s eyes, could this be considered ‘having the world in the palm of your hand’?

(OK – very small world, but still.)

So it was FreeMe to the rescue – and Meatball is no longer at risk of becoming a canine appetiser.

Oh, and I guess FreeMe might quite need some cash to feed all these animals – so if you fancy making a donation I’m sure they would be pleased.

Photo Credits: Lori

I came across this un-blog a while ago and bookmarked it because its such a cool idea.

We spend our lives rushing around trying to achieve more and more, in a chaotic environment which seems to get busier and louder every day.  Watching the one minute video clips in this blog seems to just slow everything down for a little while – great for a quick battery recharge.  I found if I just switch off and focus on the video, I can almost smell the cool, crisp early morning air, or, depending which video is on for the day, the sea spray.

Like having a holiday in a minute.

Have a look at today’s video:

I recall having more than one “Bah-humbug” moment in 2008 when the subject of Twitter came up. I just could not see the point of telling the world when I was going to make another cup of coffee. Even worse, I really didn’t want to be interrupted by hundreds of people telling me what they ate for lunch.

I hadn’t made the mistake of dismissing it without even looking. I had signed in to do just that, but, having decided it wasn’t worth doing, had not uttered a single Tweet. And that was how I intended to stay. But towards the end of 2008 I got an email telling me that Christopher Penn was “following” me. (To the uninitiated this could sound as if I was being stalked, but in Twitter terminology this is a good thing – it means someone wants to hear what you have to say).

This was intriguing. Why would someone follow me when I hadn’t said a word. So I logged back in to have another look. And I downloaded Christopher Penn’s ebook on Twitter for business. Having dipped the tip of my toe in the Twittersphere, I decided it wouldn’t do any harm to explore a bit more and within an hour or so of playing in Twitter, I discovered its benefits.  There are loads of lists online which tell you why Twitter is a great business tool – I read one just this evening on John Jantsch’s blog.

Now, 2 months into my Twitter dialogues I’ve learned two great lessons which I didn’t anticipate. Firstly, Twitter has helped break down barriers to spontaneous writing. It used to take me ages to think through what I was going to write. I was amongst the many thousands who second guesses their prose and ends up deleting and changing more than they write. Twitter gets you into the habit of diving in and sharing your thoughts. I’ve found my writing time has become far more productive.

And then I found TweetStats. This is a site which tells you all sorts of interesting (if trivial) things about the time of day, day of the week, and people you have Tweeted most often. And it has a neat little tab that gives you a cloud tag or Wordle of your Tweets.  There’s something about seeing your stream of thoughts translated into a cluster of words that gives a very clear idea of your frame of mind. Wow! I had no idea that’s what I sound like. The good news is that its quite a positive picture. It will be interesting to see what else I can learn about myself through Twitter.

Twenty years ago, your sphere of influence was probably limited to the people you knew personally, and perhaps some who knew them. Most people didn’t create waves much further than that in their circle of family, friends and business Now:

• Its much easier to talk to people all over the world, but
  • its also much harder to be heard above the noise
• Messages on Twitter, Facebook and other ‘broadcast’ sites are quickly overlaid with new ideas, but
  • profiles and facts about you are on the internet forever
• Its easy to hit the ’send’ button and spread your ideas and your messages, but
  • each idea has so much more capacity to help or harm your reputation.

Seth Godin’s post about person brand tells three powerful stories illustrating why we should care about everything that’s ever written about us online. Your reputation is your most valuable asset – protecting it should be a priority.

So here’s a challenge for you – have you ever typed your name into Google and done a search on yourself?  What does your online personal brand look like? What does the world read about you? Hopefully there are no disruptions or dents in your image.  But if there are, what are you going to do about it?

Photo credit: Olga

In September last year, I blogged about a poignant and frightening slide presentation on the issue of the global water shortage -THIRST

. Garr Reynolds highlights another water presentation that we should all be listening to. Pass it on. It is important.

Really important!

This video was made by metroamv as an entry in the U@50 contest. It was awarded second place.

Food for thought.

I always knew there was good reason to loathe peanut butter! That is, aside from the taste, the texture and just about everything else about it. This gluey pasty muck was the food group I hated most as a child – and I’ve just found that I was right all the time. Oh how gratifying it is to be proved right after all these years…

Tim Manners writes about the FDA’s standards of ‘acceptable contamination’ in food – in particular, peanut butter. It seems that based on economic grounds, its perfectly acceptable to have a level of contamination that is makes food ‘offensive to the senses’ – as long as its not dangerous. On many levels this makes good common sense. Its far more sensible than the EU’s obsession with uniformly-shaped potatoes (or any other vegetable). Personally, I don’t care how straight my carrots were before they landed up on my plate.

But for some reason, I find it slightly disturbing that the FDA’s standard of acceptable contamination for peanut butter, just as an example, allows for a 530g jar of this highly nutritious kids’-favourite-food to include

• 145 bug parts,
• 5 or more rodent hairs (how many more, I have to ask?), and
• up to 125g of grit!

But perhaps I’m just being squeemish and its my peanut-butter prejudice showing…

Photo credit: Denis Collette

Hayley wrote a great post on our Engauge blog on how to make feedback more valuable.

Thought you might like to have a look.