Author: jedcssn768

There are two things you need to do RIGHT NOW.

1 — Sign up with Plaxo, and add your current home and work information. (If you have them, add the information for your blogs, Flickr streams, Twitter and other web accounts, too.)

2 — Sign up with LinkedIn, and add however much of your resume/CV you’d like.

No matter what you do or where you are in your career, this will be of tremendous use to you.

Plaxo

What the hell is Plaxo? It’s your addressbook on steroids, and synchronized like the fastest rowing boat you’ve ever seen. If you’re on Plaxo and move (either jobs or homes), as soon as you update your information it’s automatically updated in your friends’ and colleagues’ address books! (If they’re also Plaxo members, that is.) When your friends move, their information is automatically updated in your address book. Perhaps more importantly, you can select with each person how much of your information they can see… home, work, and other levels of access. It’s great!

Furqan talks about the latest version of Plaxo here, and John Jantsch of “Duct Tape Marketing” discusses Plaxo here. I know as I get close to Christmas card season, I wish everyone I know had Plaxo accounts! It’s also nice that Plaxo will send you e-mails to remind you of peoples’ birthdays, which can help make sure you don’t miss any important dates.

One of the coolest things about Plaxo is that it synchronizes all of your contacts and calendars across accounts and computers! Just check out this video for more information!

https://www.youtube.com/v/n-yXudmFowE

LinkedIn

What the hell is LinkedIn? It’s your resume/CV online, and connections to your entire professional network. Whether you’re looking for information on a company you’re going to do business with, trying to recruit someone for a job at your company, LinkedIn is a fantastic tool to take advantage of the network you already have. (You can have LinkedIn scan your contacts list to find people that are already members.)

You may not see benefits from joining straight away, but at some point, it will be invaluable for you.

Once you’re all hooked up…

Then you can combine Plaxo and LinkedIn if you want to! (I haven’t, but it is possible.) TechCrunch said that Plaxo + LinkedIn + iPhone = Brilliant. Furqan talks about the combination of tools here, relative to a discussion on how to get introduced to venture capitalists.

It’s a small fee that Plaxo charges for their Pro-level account, but then you can attach your LinkedIn account with your Plaxo account so that both of these great services are synch’d up, as well.

Summary

Do it now… register with Plaxo and register with LinkedIn. You’ll be glad you did.

This is hilarious… h/t to Fred Wilson:

This little town was featured on the front page of the NYTimes website today. It’s a heartwarming story. (Link is here.) Essentially this little town is an absolute football powerhouse, having not lost a game in several seasons, now.

But as I was reading it, I had a blinding flashback… I’ve BEEN to Smith Center, Kansas!!

Back in my Solar Car days, I stayed with people in the town during Sunrayce 97, which went right through town. From what I remember, they were very supportive of the whole event, and the whole town opened their doors to let us stay in their homes. (There certainly weren’t enough hotels for hundreds of college kids to stay in!)

Now I do sometimes get a little confused between Smith Center, Kansas and St. Francis, Kansas, which was another little town we stayed in on the race. (If memory serves, we stayed at the county sheriff’s home in St. Francis, but it’s been a decade so I may have forgotten a few details.)

Anyway, it’s a funny little thing to see a town like that featured in a national paper, and realise that I’ve actually been there. Strange…

A while ago I read about this absolutely INCREDIBLE new bookstore in the Netherlands. (H/T to John at Brand Autopsy.) An old (essentially unused) church in the heart of this city was turned into the most incredible bookstore you’ll likely ever see.

The building hadn’t been used as a church for years. In more recent times it had been used for bicycle storage, of all things, which seems like an inappropriately poor use for a building of that significance.

Well, a bookstore has now moved in and really done a good job of melding a bookstore into the space and beauty of a good-sized cathedral.

These photos are fantastic.

[UPDATE]- More photos on the BLDG BLOG here.