I use LinkedIn a lot, and find it of great benefit: I’ve had people contact me through LinkedIn about working with them, and I’ve used it to find people for the same reason. I have about 350 contacts, which gives me a network of over 1.5M people who I can search for and contact directly. As with most people, I use LinkedIn as a purely business network (although I do link to a few friends on it), not as a social network. It’s like Facebook for people with jobs.

One huge problem with LinkedIn was that you couldn’t remove any of your contacts yourself, you had to email to LinkedIn customer service and have them do it for you. In discussion about this very issue last night, Mark told me that there is now a way to remove contacts: go to the My Contacts page, then scroll down to the bottom right and there’s a link to remove contacts.

This morning, I did some pruning. First, a guy who I didn’t really know but we had both worked as contractors for the same company, who later spammed me with a MLM scheme — gone. Then, everyone who had been a contact for more than a year but still only had one contact (me): these are obviously people who heard about LinkedIn from me, said “oh yeah, I’ll try it”, then never went beyond accepting my initial invitation to join. Sorry, people, but you add no value to my network, and there’s no sign that you’re ever going to start.

Next, I’ll be going after the people with a very low number of contacts who haven’t updated their profile even though I know that they have moved jobs, especially those that still have their primary email address as that at their former employer: not only is their information stale, but with an incorrect email address, they’re unreachable through LinkedIn as well.

Kieran has PuTTY on his phone, and he’s not afraid to use it.

Some time ago, I started running an automated script each night that posted my del.icio.us links to my business blog. However, most of the things that I link to seem to be more related to this blog, so I’m now directing those posts here, in the Links category.

By some weird coincidence (or not), the day after I started doing that Tom wrote a post railing against the practice of doing these same “link” posts. I don’t want to stop doing them, since I believe that they add value, but I’ve created two different feeds if you consume this blog via a feed reader: one if you want all the posts, and one if you want everything except the link posts. There’s also a third one for the comments on posts, if you want to track that.

Consume to your heart’s content.

• Wikis Are Alive and Kicking in the Enterprise
  (tags: web2.0 enterprise2.0)
• Using Gmail as Your On-line Brain « Ian’s Messy Desk
  (tags: productivity web2.0)
• Boing Boing: Good documentaries on Google video
  Tons of free viewing, and downloadable (legally) too!
  (tags: tv)
• February is Keep Toronto Reading Month!
  Library Camp anyone?
  (tags: toronto books)
• Linux on a tc4200
  Someone tried installing Linux on the same tablet that I have, with mixed results.
  (tags: linux)
• TuxMobil: Tablet PCs, Pen PCs and Convertibles with Linux
  (tags: linux reference)
• The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Joey deVilla’s Personal Weblog :: Once Again, It’s Daylight Saving Time
  “The official photo of the first Monday of Daylight Saving Time” — too funny.
  (tags: offtopic)
• Discover New Treasure Restaurant
  Mmmm, dim sum
  (tags: toronto food)
• Rainbow Dim Sum, Day or Night
  More dim sum, including late night service
  (tags: food toronto)
• Linux for Beginners
  More on getting starting with Linux: choosing a distro, using virtualization as a test bed, and more.
  (tags: linux)

• Speedtest.net – The Global Broadband Speed Test
  (tags: tools)
• SOA as a SaaS…What to Plan For | March 2, 2007 05:34 AM | By Dave Linthicum
  My question: when do mashup APIs become SOA as SaaS?
  (tags: saas soa)
• How to install Wordpress on a USB stick
  (tags: blogging tools)
• A List Apart: Articles: Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!
  Using HTML and CSS to create a printed book.
  (tags: blogging books)
• bobdc.blog: Checking Out Yahoo Pipes
  I really have to try this out, soon.
  (tags: web2.0 webdesign)
• The Obvious?: The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?
  (tags: enterprise2.0)
• How to web 2.0 your bank « The Bankwatch
  I’ve had this post bookmarked in my reader for a while, thought that it was time to share it.
  (tags: web2.0 enterprise2.0)

Finally got my Ubuntu installation done yesterday, and I’m just trying out the Blog Entry Poster to create this post offline then post.

I don’t think that I’m going to use this blog writer very often: doesn’t support categories, which means that I have to go in and edit each post after publication to set the categories.

Other than that, having fun with the new O/S.

Rogers, you have to love them (or not). I use their Blackberry service (voice and data), which has good service but I find incredibly expensive when travelling: there doesn’t seem to be a good way to add US roaming onto my voice+data plan, and let’s not even talk about international.

Anyway, they sent me an SMS message today:

Rogers msg: NEW Daylight Savings Time Mar 11. 2 keep UR device date & time correct visit rogers.com/ dst 4 UR device updates. 2 opt-out of mktg msgs reply STOP

Cute. Very hip. “2″ for “to”, “UR” for “your”. However, with the relatively large screens on many phones today, those abbreviations are for the benefit of the one typing the message on a phone keypad, not for those of us reading it. Since I’m assuming that someone didn’t type this using a phone keypad, this is just a bit too cutesy.

Okay, I want them to stop their “mktg msgs”, so I reply:

STOP

Right away, I get a reply:

Msgs sent to this address are not read. Go to rogers.com/dst

Les messages envoyes a cette adresse ne sont pas lus. Consultez rogers.com/hae

Doh!

Catching up on my Harper’s reading, this caught my eye: stupid civil servant tricks, straight from Ottawa. “Canada’s New Government”? How long until they’re no longer considered “new”, and waste more time and money changing this?

Earlier this week, after my post about mesh’s lack of visible reasons for a having a bunch of white guys as their keynote speakers, I had a conversation with Mark Evans, one of the mesh organizers. Based on this chat, my assessment is that the mesh organizers exhibit little or no commitment to diversity, and Mark’s stated reasons for no women keynotes are even less compelling than the ones that I wrote in parody. He said:

• But the high-tech industry *is* a bunch of white guys. [Do you know how smug and stupid that sounds when you tell me, a woman in the high-tech industry, that the industry *is* a bunch of white guys, as if I didn't exist?]
• We tried! We really tried! [uh huh]
• Will we try harder next year? Definitely! [Did I make this blog post last year? Definitely! Will I be repeating this blog post next year? Definitely!]
• I have a lot of things going on right now, running a startup, organizing a conference. Have you ever organized a conference? Do you know how hard it is? [Oh, puh-leeze, enough with the patronizing "I'm busier/more important than you are" crap. If you couldn't do a decent job, why did you take it on?]
• Can you suggest any women speakers? [It's the organizers' responsibility to find the speakers, and maybe if you'd opened up a call for speakers, you'd get outside your walled wurstgarten -- there's a pretty direct connection from the "don't call us, we'll call you" message of your Contact page to the homogeneity of your keynote speakers, drawn from your circle of friends and their friends. Or if you looked at any one of the lists of women speakers on the web that have been developed in response to exactly this issue in the past. Or if you looked at my profile as a speaker, I'm even local.]
• Can you suggest any topics? [What, like "breastfeeding 2.0"? Women in technology talk about the same things that men in technology do, we don't need special tracks or topics. We just bring some different perspectives to the table.]

He ended up with “thanks for your feedback, stay tuned and I think that you’ll really like what we have to offer.” Hmm, do I detect a dismissal?

This is such a perfect echo of past conversations on reasons why white guys choose only white guys as speakers as tech conferences. Lots of people are seeing the problem, and trying to do something about it. Just not the group of white guys who are organizing mesh.

By the way, today is International Women’s Day. Do your part by sending the mesh organizers a suggestion for a woman speaker, or post it here in the comments. Or better yet, if you know someone at any of the mesh sponsors, have them do it.

I got someone fired today, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. He was republishing the full feed from my business blog on his blog, and although he was leaving a link back to my original post, he followed it with “posted by <his name>“. Some of my regular readers had even left comments on my posts on his blog, meaning that they were not clicking through to my site and therefore not engaging me in the conversation. Since my blog is really my only form of marketing for my analyst, consulting and speaking services, anything that separates me from my readers can potentially cut into my business, and this had to stop.

I checked out his site, which appeared to be just republished full feeds from a number of other bloggers in my industry, and when I checked his About page, I found out that he’s the VP of sales for a company in my industry. Okay, republishing full feeds from someone else’s blog on your own blog is a violation of copyright, and therefore illegal. But doing it from a relatively well-known blogger who writes about your industry, when you’re the VP of sales for a technology company? That’s just plain stupid.

I did the only thing that I could: I outed him, and named his company, although I did not say that this was a company blog, which it’s not. In my books, if you hold a VP title in a company, then first of all, there is an expectation that you set some level of policy in the company, and if you’re cheating in one area of your life (like blogging) then who knows what else you’re doing in other parts of your life (like dealing with customers). Secondly, with that level of title, anything that you do in the industry can be construed to be on behalf of, or at least related to, your employer. In fact, any employment agreement that I’ve either written or signed (having been on both sides of the table) has stated that if you do or invent something that’s directly in your employer’s line of business while you’re working for them, it belongs to them, even if you do it on your own time.

Various emails ensued from the VP and his CEO, and the CEO informed me earlier today that the VP is no longer in their employ. Oh, and the VP title? Turns out it was just a puffed-up title for a salesman because he was their only employee in North America and they felt that they needed a big title for him.

It was not my intention to get someone fired by blogging about their activities, but considering that the activities were illegal and were impacting me personally, it’s hard to work up a tear over it. Somewhere along the line, someone has to put a stake in the ground about responsibility on the internet. This week, I put a stake in my little bit of territory.