Man ... so hard to keep up on all of this stuff. I should probably do NaBloPoMo every month just to keep the OCD juices going for posting in here! It seems every time I turn around it's "oops ... haven't done a LJ post in ages" and I'm sure that you'd do with some visible difference from just the book reviews and the graphics of the recent The Job Stalker posts ("recent" rather than "latest", as the one over there ===> is from Wednesday and there's been a Friday once since).Part of this is, of course, my spending as much time as I am on the job search ... I've been meaning (as you know, as I've brought it up many times previously) on getting set up with either TweetDeck or HootSuite for going through my Twitter reading. I had tried this at one time in the past with TweetDeck (which has the advantage of having "drag and drop" sorting of contacts), but gave up on it. It also has the problem of being "machine based", which is why I've thought about HootSuite, which is on the web (and I'd be able to get to it from any machine), but I seem to recall that it was organized by way of manually entering in the details of each contact, which at this point (following 500+) would be a huge project. Of course, the reason I want to do this is that I've been reading every post by every person I follow every day, and that's just taking up WAY too much time any more. I need to get this set so I can read the job boards, the key industry figures, the networking contacts I have, and on down the list of "categories". I could even have a "courtesy follow" bucket where I could drop all those folks who follow my Twitter account. I currently have 40 more folks following me than I follow, but the list would be LOT larger if I automatically re-followed folks who follow me ... I get maybe a half a dozen a day, but they must be running those programs where they auto-unfollow if their follow isn't reciprocated. However, in my current "system" (reading everything via the web interface) I just can't add folks that I'm not specifically interested in reading. So, why haven't I blocked the time out to do this? Well, there's been this scuttlebutt out there about all these amazing things that Twitter is about to unveil for their web interface that are supposed to blow the 3rd party things out of the water (this coming with the new ad-supported model, sort of following the Google example). I'd hate to spend 12-24 hours of flogging this into shape on HootSuite only to find that I could have done as well or better by just waiting.
I've also been out to a lot of networking things, which tend to take up all my evening and leave me sort of drained when I do get back to the computer at night ... many times I've meant to check in here, but have fallen asleep slumped over the keyboard before I got far enough down the "to do" list!
However, my "luck" may be changing. I ended up with free tickets to two things this week ... first was the English Beat / Fishbone show down at the House of Blues on Tuesday (which I ended up giving away on Twitter), and then two tickets for the opening night of Alice In Wonderland (which was pretty fabulous) that I won in a Twitter/web contest that local recruiters Wunderland were running. I took Daughter #2 to that last night, and it was a blast. I almost went to another networking thing after that (I would have been arriving at midnight at a TweetUp that was scheduled from 9pm to 2am), but figured that I should stay in and try to get caught up on other stuff (oh, like the 30 or so job postings currently still in my tab bar).
Anyway, clicky-clicky to go see the posting for The Job Stalker over there ... I should have more tomorrow.