The 2nd most popular post of this blog is the one about creative resumes, which brings in about 300+ hits/month all on it’s own, almost all of it from Google. I guess a lot of people out there are trying to get an advantage in the job market by posting up creative resumes that help differentiate them from the rest of the applicants. Personally, I’m not too sure about the creative resumes, I believe they do help differentiate you, but whether it’s a good differentiating is a separate story. A lot of resumes are boring, in both context and design, but having a really well designed resume with a boring context isn’t going to get you far either…(at least that’s what I think).

From my perspective, it’s good to jot down a couple of key interesting points about yourself that you think might land you a job, and then form a consistent ‘brand’ around those key points. Then make sure what you say online, what’s in the resume and what’s in the cover letter all gel together to project those key points, making it a differentiating factor that will be your brand. However, that’s a topic for a separate day. Today, I’d like to show you how I shared my resume online using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

Crowdsourcing seems to the buzz these days, with LG crowdsourcing a cellphone design off crowdsourcing website crowdspring and starbucks receiving more than 17,000 coffee ideas of the web from their crowdsourcing platform mystarbucksidea.com. However, as with all new trends there are detractors and with crowdsourcing the number of detractors seems to be growing each day.

Previously I blogged about the wide spectrum of crowdsourcing , from the low end and mundane on Amazons Mechanical Turk, to the high end and niche Crowdspring. However, when a detractor to the term includes wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, then it’s time to study this a bit more in depth. So what is the ugly side of crowdsourcing and what does it strike a nerve with Jimmy Wales…and just about every designer I know.

While blogging over the weekend, I stumbled across an interesting article on marketing blogs. Part of the article advised on creating a blog identity, a sort of superhero that represented the blog. This would make your blog more memorable and thus help differentiate your blog in a very very crowded space. A superhero could be something quite simple, just a adjective and a noun and one of my favorite blogs, the evil HR lady springs to mind. Although I read the blog so often, I can’t remember the name of the author, but the branding is persistent and it just sticks. So I thought I’d create an online persona that fit my blog and a logo to go along with it. After all, keith’s blog is just as memorable as John’s blog or Mark’s blog, there really is nothing ‘sticky’ about it.

I’ve started this blog ‘journey’ about 7 months ago and so far it’s been great. The experience has been a real eye opener on how technology and social media work, and now I’m beginning to develop an understanding on how hits make their way over to keithrozario.com.

For instance, even though I grew my twitter followers from zero to 350, the traffic from twitter seems really paltry. Something of the order of 2-3 hits/month. With the amount of effort I put into twitter, to say 2-3hits/month is disappointing is an understatement. I think the reason for this is that people go on twitter to search for news, not for tutorials or how-to’s.Most of my blog entries are either reviews of certain web apps or tutorials, and not so much ’news’, and that’s probably the reason twitter isn’t getting me those hits. Another possible reason is 350 isn’t the right amount of people to generate those hits.

Sometimes life throws you surprising ironies that you can’t help but just bury your head in sorrow, like an ex-girlfriend becoming your boss or the office jerk winning the lottery.

Google aspires to overcome facebook as the number 1 social networking site by launching things like +1 and Google+, however in a surprising twist of fate the number 1 user on Google+ was none other than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. You almost hear the collective ‘DOH!’ from the googleplex echo through silicon valley. Homer Simpson would be proud.

The situation is made even worse by the fact that the 2nd most popular user on the social networking site is Google co-founder Larry Page, missing out on the  number 1 spot by more than 20,000 followers. Marks probably thinking to himself, If Google can’t even beat me in their own back yard how do they intend to beat me when facebook really starts competing?

I’ve been using twitter for some time now, as I hope to make it the default social media for promoting my blog. Thanks for platforms like bufferapp and bit.ly, I can track how often people visit my website from twitter. The result aren’t good, in fact I’d be lucky if a tweet was able to garner 2 hits to my website, most of the time it hovers around an agonizing ZERO!!

So what am I doing wrong?

The recent events in the UK while tragic have unveiled some new uses for crowdsourcing. Some time ago people used Google Wave (now called Apache Wave) to help find a criminal murder suspect, which was amazing news if you ask me, but it still didn’t save Google Wave. Now however, the guys over at a website called Zavilia had a brilliant idea of using crowdsourcing to solve the London rioting problem, the premise was simple, users would upload photos of the looters and rioters and those photos would then be posted online.  Each rioter would be labled with an alphabet, and finally other users could check out the pictures and begin identifying anyone they knew…brilliant solution.  Personally, I can’t imagine solving this problem without crowdsourcing, and it just goes to show that in the future we will solve problems together via collaboration on a massive scale rather than a few geniuses leading the way.

The guys over at zavilia have shutdown their website claiming:

The development of Zavilia: Identify UK Rioters has been temporarily paused due to a decrease in traffic and in user interactions. However, we fully intend to continue development at some point in the near future.

Amazing.

Pick&Zip is an amazing app that allows you to copy over your entire Facebook photo albums all at once in one zip file. The application even allows you to view ALL the photos you’re tagged in and download those as well, especially apt if you’re looking to migrate this stuff to Google+. It also act as a great picture viewer for all your photos on Facebook.

Vanity URLs are URLs that have some sort of meaning to them rather than a random collection of numbers and letters, so instead of getting http://plus.google.com/18923937194123, you get a much nicer http://plus.google.com/keith , now that’s way cooler. It’s sort of like vanity plates for Online Social Networks.

Facebook has been offering this for some time, and so has LinkedIN, but the new kid on the block Google+ doesn’t. Or does it?

Buffer is a great tool that helps your organize and schedule your tweets to maximize your shameless attempts to promote your website on twitter.

Well let’s face it, I’m on twitter but with only 39 followers its not really adding any hits to my website…well maybe one or two. What’s clear though is that good blog content without any social media promotion on twitterr , LinkedIN or facebook means I have to rely on Google bringing in the hits, that’s like starting a company with only 1 customer and then relying on that customer only. If I’m going to get 1000 hits/ month, then I’m going to have to get serious on twitter and start churning out content that aligns with what my followers on twitter want to see.