Amy Jo Kim has put together a fantastic slideshare about metagame design.
If you work with social media, online commuities or anything where you’re bringing people together, do an exercise & think about your space in terms of points, feedback/rewards & viral (all described in the deck). You don’t need to be building a game to apply these principals.
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.
i’ve been testing out a few products of late to improve my organisation. i have too much scattered about… in my phone, in my email, on a to-do site, in word docs, and on & on. i’d like a easier way to find info from those notes i took in a class 4 years ago that surprise surprise, might be useful now. or find some data from an article that i knew i’d want to refer back to.
my rough criteria:
my top runners are evernote, zotero & personal brain.
personal brain wins in the visual mind map criteria. or rather visual folder/mind map combination. i’m really digging it. in a lot of ways this is my fav. or maybe i just really want it to be my fav since it’s the only visual tool that seems to work for me. unfortunately it’s pricey, doesn’t have a phone version & i can’t figure out if there’s any citing abilities. you can only export your data if you buy the high end version (holding data captive is pretty shitty brain folks). oh, and their website is fairy horrid.
zotero is focused on the academic referencing and does a good job. there’s 2 things that annoy me… the promise of sucking citation data from a page doesn’t work as well as I’d hope & the UI isn’t as responsive as I’d like. I need to use the mouse A LOT. also, it doesn’t have a phone version. otherwise it’s a great tool. and open source gets bonus points.
i’ve spent the least amount of time with evernote but i think it might take over from zotero since i’m not writing academic papers. Very easy to use, good UI, desktop, tons of phones, web, good sync’ing! and the only one of these 3 that has to-do functionality.
What tools do you use?
(other tools i looked at include SciPlore, Buzan’s mind mapping, several web2.0 mindmaps, some other referencing software that i can’t think of the name)
almost 10 years ago, i co-founded e-mint. we’ve been discussing what we should do for our big birthday so i’ve been thinking about what sort of event to host & how to make it enjoyable, great, inclusive, memorable.
so i’m intrigued by smoozl. launched last month at the Game Developers Conference in SF, it combines elements of foursquare (awarding badges) & LinkedIn (recommendations). they call it a ‘real-time, organic, visual recommendation system to better identify potentially meaningful connections within a daunting crowd of 20,000+ game hounds.‘.
we won’t be anywhere near that big & won’t all be in the same location but it’s still an interesting idea. definitely a great ice breaker! anyone have first hand experience with shmoozl?
Last month, Inc Magazine announced they were going to leave their fancy office & become a virtual organisation.
At least for a month – for a test run. The April issue of the magazine will let us know how they went.
Along the way they’ve been talking to others who work virtually. I caught this video convo with Matt Mullenweg from Automattic /Wordpress.
Matt talks about their distributed organisation & something he said just clicked with me. When asked about the problems with the communicating to his staff around the world he said that communication problems aren’t a problem. That they’re just something to be aware of. Everything has strength & weakness.
That immediately took me back to a conversation I had multiple times with a former boss. Our video conference system was bad (fuzzy video, hard to hear audio). Everyone was aware the system was bad but not many seemed aware of the small things that could make it better… making sure you were close to the microphone when speaking, making sure everyone had received the file electronically before the meeting, letting 1 person talk at a time so the microphone could pick up that 1 sound, etc. Often I pointed out small things like this could make the difference but I could tell it went into the too hard basket. *
Each communication tool has strengths & weaknesses. You just need to understand what those are & how to work with the weakness. It’s not a problem. FANTASTIC!
(*Actually, the more video meetings we had, the more some people adapted but there wasn’t ever a mindset change)