The subsequent post on the LinkedIn Blog—Linkedin Blog » SlideShare + LinkedIn = More Value for Professionals and TC post—LinkedIn Acquires Professional Content Sharing Platform SlideShare For $119M | TechCrunch—touches on this key aspect of the acquisition, but I don’t think either really drives the point home well enough. Allow me to fill in the gaps.

As you know I’m back doing freelance writing. It’s been about six months since I was taking writing gigs, so I’ve been busting my hump reforging connections and working on getting more gigs. One facet of what I do is teach. A big part of teaching is giving a solid presentation. Solid presentations are done in Keynote or PowerPoint. Where do I post a lot of my presentations (not all, but I might start now)—Slideshare.

As a professional, I’ve been on LinkedIn for years and years. I try to keep my profile up to date and catchy. So LinkedIn is also essential for me to get gigs. It’s my digital resume. It’s my professional listing in the real Who’s Who of the Internet.

Well, if my Slideshare presentations are now just an automatically embedded part of my LinkedIn profile, people can quickly see examples of my presentation style (offbeat and quirky with lots of usable nuggets of information, in case you were wondering) all the while looking at what I’ve been doing professional (all the way back to the late 90s when I launched over two-dozen pharma websites in a year and a half and my start as Canada’s first professional blogger in 2004).

Excited? Yeah I’m really excited about this new move. Authority and expertise in words and pictures for everyone to see.

Nice.

Evernote
Evernote (www.evernote.com) has become the de facto way to store notes for later. With apps for nearly all smartphones as well as the web and all desktop operating systems, people are storing more and more information in Evernote. Could Evernote leverage their loyal following into something bigger?

Thanks to Leila Pejman for reminding me that I had some foresight into this. Of course I also wish I had this same foresight when I wanted to buy Apple stock ten years ago. In February I was thinking Evernote was well positioned to do something with their rabidly loyal fanbase (I’m becoming one of them, though I haven’t make the jump to a premium membership just yet), an IPO makes a lot of sense I think. Unlike a lot of other companies in this space (note-taking, storage, etc), Evernote has made mobile clients a key part of the app ecosystem (apposystem?) and that is going to be the key to their success. As we move back to a time where we keep big computers (let’s call them base stations) at home or the office and travel around with smaller devices you need a mobile tool that helps you keep things coordinated.

Would I write posts and such in Evernote? Probably not. I like to stick to more focused “writing” tools like Byword (of course I’m anxiously awaiting Scrivener for iOS) for stuff like that. Where does Evernote fit in? Notes for research, notes in meetings, links for later. More and more of my “I’ll need this later” things are in Evernote, and I know I’m not alone in this either,  so as Evernote preps for the their next level of coolness…I’d like to say I guessed it first.

After the slides are sketches I created for the talk on Blogging for Business by Rebecca Bollwitt, HootSuite by Craig Ryomoto, The Cloud by David MacLaren, and Twitter 101 by Tristan Jutras.

I once again find myself using two computers. Except this time it’s my MacBook Air that serves as my “desktop” while my iPad is now my “laptop.”

And I’m not the only one. Within my circle of friends, I know several people who are also using their iPad as their portable computer. I even have a handful friends who have an iPad as their only computer.

It is not a sacrifice to use the iPad as a primary device. I wanted to take a look at some of the most compelling reasons to use an iPad as your portable, if not your only, computer.From: Why the iPad Is My New Laptop — Shawn Blanc.

Often when the discussion comes around to using an iPad exclusively (or as nearly exclusively as possible) as a laptop replacement, people talk about how iPads don’t really let you multitask. You know, have lots of windows all over the screen so you can jump around between things quickly. Now while I know this is convenient when researching or copying and pasting text and links for articles, frankly I think we’ve really overblown the “I must multitask to be working” idea. Honestly, I think forcing you to focus on the task at hand and forcing a conscious decision to switch to another app makes for better work and concentration.

Tonight I was working on my slides for tomorrow. First I did a mindmap on my Mac with a few of my thoughts, then imported to my iPad. I decided I would try drawing my slides in the iPad app Paper, so I wanted my notes with me to refer to as I drew (doodled, scribbled, whatever).

Yeah I had to jump back and forth to look at the mindmap. Yeah I had to jump to screens to look at icons. But when I was working on a sketch…that’s all I was doing. It was focused. I could ignore the emails coming in, but when I saw an important email, I switched over to it.

The same goes for writing on my iPad. I have focus. I’m trying to emulate it here using the “Press This” bookmarklet to just keep to the same screen while I write. No switching around. See it, write it, post it.

Its’ this focus that I think makes the iPad the best way to get many things done—especially on the go. I didn’t say everything. I still do most of my book chapters on my Mac. Why? Because I need to take screenshots in Chrome and refer to them as I work on text. However I believe now that our obsession with doing lots of things at once on our machines has done more to keep us from getting things done than helped. I almost wonder how fast some apps would run if one only one app could run at a time. Worth wondering about.

Maybe I can’t get absolutely everything done on my iPad I can with my Mac, but I’ll tell you one thing. My little shoulder bag that carries all the gear I need and more is a heck of a lot lighter than the laptop bag I used to haul around.

And that can’t be a bad thing.

Learn the basics of audio and video podcasting in this one-day, hands-on workshop. You learn how to record, edit, encode, and post audio and video podcasts. Topics include hardware, software, how to add music and titles, where to post your podcast, search engine optimization and how to host a live Internet radio show. One day is all you need to get on air and podcast with confidence and ease!
Saturday, July 7th
Standard Fee: $350+tax
UBC Continuing Studies

This is always a fun class to teach. The afternoon will be spent working on a project of your choosing to put what you learned in the morning into practice.

This course is designed for the WordPress.org user who wants to learn how to manage a site, edit themes and troubleshoot problems. Through in-class demonstrations and exercises, discover how to maintain and customize a self-hosted WordPress
website, including manual installation, configuring plugins and creating child themes. Learn alternative uses of WordPress, as well as how to manage multiple WordPress websites. This class is intended for experienced computer users who are already familiar with WordPress.

Note: We recommend taking Build a Website with WordPress (IM810) or having equivalent experience prior to this course.

Saturday, June 16th

Standard Fee: $350+tax
UBC Continuing Studies

Much of this full-day class will work on solving the challenges you’re facing with your WordPress-based website, so come with questions!

This class has been in much demand as a follow up to my intro to WordPress class, so it will likely fill up fast!

Learn how to make a professional looking website using the WordPress blogging platform. Beginning with WordPress.com, you learn the basics of how to turn a WordPress blog into a website, how to tune it for search engines and how to choose the right theme. This workshop teaches you how and when to use WordPress.com or WordPress.org, including domain names and hosting, and using WordPress.org to build dynamic, elegant and professional looking websites quickly and easily. You don’t have to know how to code to have a great website, you just have to know how to click.

Standard Fee: $350+tax
UBC Continuing Studies

This class always sells out, so don’t wait and sign up now.

What else? Stay tuned. My goal is to have a steady flow of writing gigs and places I contribute to around the Internet. This is, of course, on top of working on my latest book with Catherine and pitching another book to my editor as well.

Busy is good.

I’ve found, much to my surprise, that I’m much more productive as a writer when I have a lot of writing to do. If I need to write on lots of topics and places, I find I’m sharper and more on my game.

So, if you need content for your site, a screencast on how your app works, or things like that…let me know!

Until then, I have some RSS feeds to catch up on.

Oh and lunch.

Back in the day when David and I started blogging—I always thought I started after him, turns out I have a few years on him in the blogging world—blogs were the way to share everything that we came across online. And I think that might have been to the detriment of the content. Sometimes you just wanted to share something interesting, something that didn’t need much explanation or comment, but since it looked pretty strange to just have something like:

You have to read this XKCD cartoon.

And that’s it as a post, we wrote about it.

Frankly, sometimes we should have just kept our traps shut.

Then came Twitter.

Okay, fine we tried link blogs and Tumblr and other tools came around, but I think it was Twitter that really made the act of just simply sharing…just that: simple sharing.

And of course we’ve had Facebook for a goodly while now.

These tools, we all know, made sharing simple, easy, and effortless. No pressure to include our 150 words of wisdom with the link (not that you could do that on Twitter), just share because it’s interesting and move on.

Of course, this meant that blogging and personal websites and all the rest of that stuff was dead. All we need is a Twitter account, be on Facebook, and have a page on About.me to participate fully in social media.

Bull feathers.

No matter how many times blogging is deemed deceased, and people (aka pundits) feel that we don’t need websites, we still need places to write long-form stuff. We need a place to be our digital home base. Sure I’m on Twitter. Sure I’m even pretty active on Facebook (I know the confirmed Facebook curmudgeon, active on Facebook). Heck, I’m even pinning on Pinterest. No matter what I come back to this site. Sure when I get busy it gets rather neglected, but it’s here. The 2500+ posts (with 3700+ comments!) aren’t going anywhere. I just keep adding to the collection.

Just to keep writing long-form stuff. Sections of book chapters. Missives like this. I can’t write this stuff on Twitter. Facebook? Sure I guess, but I don’t really want to lock my thoughts into Mark’s Garden of Wealth and Dreams. Fine, Google+ could manage to do this, but you know something, there is a reason we still like to read things in a “book” format. You know something laid out to be read…we like having control over how our content is displayed.

And we like to read content that has had some thought put into the layout.

So this site is going to live on for a long time and I’m going to keep writing.

And writing.

And no matter how many Twitter followers I have, fans on Facebook, or how high (or low) my Klout score gets…this is still my site.

And here’s where I’ll continue to be an Internet rogue.

So I hit 100 (long time ago, actually) but my rank has dropped. This, actually isn’t surprising. First there are a lot more Twitter users out there. Second there are lots of people who have far more Twitter followers than I do. Third, and this I think is the real heart of it, I haven’t been nearly as active on Twitter (or Google+ or Facebook) in the past year (ish) as I was in the past. While working at Simply, I spent most of my time focused on their Twitter and Facebook profile. Sure mine was important, but I really needed to give Simply a boost. I succeeded, by the way. Simply has far, far more followers on Twitter and Fans on Facebook than when I started. Engaged fans and followers, by the way.

But I digress.

Klout, I haz it

Klout is the big daddy of influence measurement tools around right now. Love it or hate it, feel it’s a great measure, better than a sharp stick in the eye, or just total crap, you have to accept that Klout is out there, popular, and probably here to stay. In fact—and especially since I’m back in the hunt as a freelance writer—this post on Wired (via Cecily on Facebook) on Klout drove home the fact that you just can’t ignore Klout in this business if you wish to be in business.

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

What Your Klout Score Really Means | Epicenter | Wired.com.

I’ve known for about a week that my time at Simply was drawing to a close, so I’ve been blogging more, tweeting more, and look at my Klout score:

Nice hockey stick, if I do say so myself. The real lesson is—and the article in Wired reinforces this—if you wantb to increase (or maintain) your Klout score you need to participate in social media. Participate. Not just share and retweet (those are important, of course), but reply, mention, discuss, connect.

Oh and don’t think for a moment that I’ve been increasing all my social media activity just to raise my Klout score. My increased Klout score is a result of me re-engaging with people. Klout might not be perfect as a measure, but I’ll give it one thing, Klout does show when you’re sitting on the sidelines and not playing in the game.

Influence for your sake, not Klout’s

This is the crux of it. One doesn’t just “become influential” overnight. It takes work. Continued and applied work. Slack off, and you’re not as influential as you once were. Do I still have influence? Yes, certainly. Would I like to have more? No question. Will it happen overnight? No way.

I am lucky in that since my days of becoming a pro blogger back in 2004 (yikes 8 years as a professional blogger!), I worked hard, wrote a lot, made friends, and built a solid foundation to (re)build on. Now the hardest work begins, launching to the next level.

Boo yah!

A little visit to downtown Vancouver is in order for Thursday.

Of course the inevitable, “So, what’s next for you?” question follows right on the heels of announcements of leaving a job, so I’ll tell you…

I’m going back to what I love best: writing, professional blogging, and blogging in general.

Yes, I’m re-entering the world of freelance writing.

Not that I ever really left freelance writing. I’ve been working on books and book proposals even while at Simply (the second edition of Create Your Own Blog is due on shelves any time now, plus Catherine Winters and I are madly working on our WordPress templates book), but now I’m going full bore looking for freelance writing projects.

Need a seasoned writer to contribute to your tech blog? Have a newsletter that could use a lead article that pops? Need someone who can write (and video) product reviews for your site? Zap me a line at tris [at] trishussey.com or fill out this handy form and let’s talk.

I’m excited—and more than a little scared—about this new direction, but sometimes you just have to let go and jump in. So … here we go!

Whee!

Amazing how taking a few pictures, editing in Aperture and Acorn, then uploading to a WordPress site can be called “work…”, and yet it is.

No, I no longer wish I had an 11in Air. What I have here – a third-generation iPad and an Apple Wireless Keyboard – is better. I have better-than-good native iOS apps to handle almost all of my mobile needs. When only a desktop app will do, I have VNC, and/or the wonderful OnLive Desktop service that allows me to run Microsoft Office on a virtualised Windows 7 server.

via Andy Ihnatko – Apple’s post-PC world – Macworld UK.

I’ve used Splashtop Remote to get back to my machine if there is something that I didn’t stash in Dropbox—there isn’t much that isn’t in Dropbox, all my current writing and book projects are there—with decent success. No, it isn’t perfect, but it works pretty darn well. When I went away for a week to visit my mom in Virginia I took my iPad and that’s it. Didn’t even bother with the external keyboard (often I don’t carry the extra keyboard). You know what? It was just fine. I edited photos. I edited book proposals. I wrote emails. I updated things. Okay, I needed to use my mom’s laptop to print something, but …

The essential part of this discussion is how we use computers and the internet has changed in the past 5 years. We use a lot of services that require only simple apps to complex things. Even creating content has gotten simpler. I could write this post just as well in a simple text editor as I could in a browser or an iPad app.

And the things I need my MacBook Pro for…I need my MacBook Pro for. Sometimes I need the storage and oomph to get something done. Once in a blue moon I need to print something. And yes, I still write all my books on my MacBook Pro. However, if I have an idea that needs fleshing out or a flash of brilliance that can’t be lost, you can be sure that capturing it on my iPad isn’t going to mess with my workflow on my MacBook Pro one iota.

Have iPad, will travel. Will write. Will get stuff done. Thanks MacBook you can hang out at home.