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.

Previously I shared how I reached my target of getting 1000 hits/month on my blog. To many that’s a pittance of a target, considering some bloggers average that in a day. However, blogging isn’t just about getting the hits, to me it was also a period of self-discovery, to truly see what I could do and what could be achieved once the gloves were off, and to be honest I loved every moment of it.

Even though I work in IT for one of the biggest corporations in the world, I felt I couldn’t really explore the cool IT stuff I’m so passionate about. I may for a Fortune 500 company that reports profits in the Billions of dollars, but up until last year I was using a laptop that had Windows 2000 installed. That’s a 10 year old piece of software (and OS mind you) that I was running, and people say IT moves quickly??

As the final part of my series on stuff you can do with Amazon, I’ve already blogged about how you can share files using amazon S3 and hosting a static website on amazon S3. Now as a final part on what you can do with your FREE amazon web services account is to host a torrent file. A torrent file would allow you to share stuff online, and not pay for the full bandwidth cost of doing it, provided your leechers share the burden as well.

The concept is really simple, Amazon S3 can act as a torrent tracker as well as a storage facility, so it’s an all in one package that ensures that your torrent is tracking and there will be at least 1 tracker :)

Yesterday, I blogged on how to share files on Amazon S3, today I’ll show you how you can host a webpage on amazon S3. Now Amazon S3 is a simple storage service, and all it does it store files, but if you store a html file you can change this simple storage service into a webhost.

How does it work? Simple.

If you store a picture file (jpeg for example), and then share a url to everyone. Chances are people will click that URL and it’ll open the picture in a browser. However, if you share a html file, then people clicking on that URL will be able to view a web page on their browser and they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, because that’s essentially what webhost do anyway, they merely store your html file.

There are a couple of ways you can share files on the web for free, for instance you can create a website to share your files (although that depends on whether you have a hosting plan) or you use websites like minus.com to share it (but they have limits to the file size etc etc). For sharing large files like your wedding photos, may require you fork out a bit of cash to truly have unlimited downloads and good connectivity.

If you’ve got a large 1GB file for example you’re hoping to send out to a bunch of friends and colleagues, your best bet may be Amazons Simple Storage Service (S3). The reason why I like S3, is that just like everything else with Amazon it’s a pay as you use model, which means there are no monthly fix fees and the moment your files stop becoming the flavor of the month, you’ll stop paying bandwidth for it. Plus I’m applying for a job at Amazon and hopefully this scores me some points :)

The internet Corporation for assigned Names and Numbers (more affectionately known as evil ICANN) has recently announced a new .xxx domain specifically for adult content online. Basically a safe place we can store porn on the internet away from our children. What’s interesting though, is that a .xxx domain are by definition associated with pornography and smut, that certain corporations and even people would not want to be a part of. For instance, I’m quite sure everyone’s lining up for www.BillClinton.xxx but Bill Clinton may not be too happy about it. So in light of this rather special domain name, comes a very special process that involves ensuring regular tax-paying adult content providers can bid for domain names they want, while allowing the rest of us to also work towards preventing others from getting our names tarnished with an .xxx post-fix.

So can we work on preventing my name from being associated with pornography?

Apparently Google isn’t content being the number one place you have for your knowledge thirst. Google is working on being the number place you’d look for anything and everything, from the price of gold to currency exchange and now even flight schedules.

Typing in a flight number (with no spaces) directly into Google yields the flight status in terms of departure and arrival times. Not to mention letting you know of delays ahead of time, the flight data is pulled from flightstats.com and Google does a fine job of displaying the data directly before the query results.