If you like history, or just reading about peoples’ lives, the new London Lives site is amazing! It’s an insight into daily life of ordinary people in 18th century London.

The site has taken data from a range of sources – court transcripts, hospital records, gov’t, charity – and gives you a taste of what it would be like to live back then.

I searched for my old London address & came up empty. It would have been great to hear about shop keepers & the people who lived the building I lived in. I did find court records from several thefts on the same street (makes sense, my street was very commercial) – hankerchiefs gone missing & some cheese. In both those cases, the accused were found guilty & the sentance was death! As was Margaret Larney who was executed in 1758. An amazing story of a poor woman struggling with childcare while she worked, doing something illegal to supplement the household income, being betrayed by her friends, her husband abandoning the family after she’s convicted & her execution for ‘high treason’.

For a slightly happier story, you can read about Sarah Parker who went from accepting charity from the church to working at a church.

congrats to the Economic and Social Research Council & the 2 unis who put this site together/funded it – the Universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield. Excellent idea!

via Futurity

i have an unhappy site at the moment & need to figure out what’s wrong. sorry, no articles today. all sold out.

A few weeks ago I saw someone using Wordle on their resume website & thought what a cool idea! I didn’t realise just how much of an interesting experiement this would be. Turns out it’s a great way to see what the resume is really communicating (and a different way of communicating your resume).

I can work in 2 countries. One country prefers short 1-2 page resumes and the other is happy with longer (mine is 4 pages). My 4 pager includes highlights, a summary, goal and a job by job listing of responsibilities & achievements. My 2 pager is focused on overall skills & achievements with a just a list of where I’ve worked.

First I ran the longer Aussie resume (see below). It definitely communicates that I’m into product (management) and communities (as in Online Community & Social Media) and revenue (as in improving products so they have revenue). Seems I also use the word ‘including’ a lot

Then I ran the shorter skills focused USA resume. Community & revenue have completely dropped off! Experience, business & sales have grown in size.

The resumes are slightly different snapshots so here I’ve brought them both together:

Product now dominates (makes sense!) and there’s a broader picture of me with more evenly weighted words like community, team, business, managed, sales, revenue, support.

So what am I doing with this insight? Will I be changing my resumes? Probably not.

The biggest shock for me was the disappearance of the word ‘community’ in the USA resume. I’ve done product management for several online communities & it’s a differenciator in the market. But it can also be a deterient as multiple recruiters have said ‘Why are you interested in this job? There’s no community aspect’ and then didn’t seem to understand/care that I have experience in other areas (content, search, tools, etc) as well. That’s why I’ll leave it alone for the moment.

What does your resume communicate in a tag cloud?

*FYI, I removed product names & company names before putting the text into Wordle.

this sunday the site will be down as my hosting company is moving stuff around.

below is the start time, they’re estimating 5 hours but we all know how that goes…

Sunday midnite PST (ie San Fran)
Sunday 3am EST (ie NYC)
Sunday 8a BST (it is bst now, isn’t it London-ers?)
Sunday 5pm AEST (australian eastern ie Melbourne)

activecollab is a php/mysql project mgmt software for your server (not hosted).

oh, and i got a great spam comment today!!! on a post where i state i’m playing with the templates so things might not look great i got a comment saying

Did you consider any other viewpoints before you wrote this??

brilliant!