Chris Bigelow gave a presentation on”Your Online Presence”. I thought it was pretty good. It certainly moved me to take some actions today!

The first thing I did when I got home was set up a Google Profile for myself. It took a little fiddling to get everything  to come up right – my photo needed to be cropped, and I needed to provide a little more information than I was really comfortable providing – but now I have a link to me that is guaranteed to come up on the first page of any search results for “Kurt Schweitzer“. Of course, I already have five entries on that first page that point back to me.

While I was at Google I also set up an Alert on my name. Somebody was trying to convince me that a Google Alert could be generated anytime someone searched on my name, but as far as I can tell it will only come up if someone actually uses that search to go to a page, or if a new page or blog entry is created and indexed by Google. Regardless, it’s about time I set up an Alert on myself.

Chris also mentioned a tool called VisualCV. I discovered that VisualCV provides a way to post an online resume that includes multimedia elements, such as videos, charts and graphs, Word documents, etc. It looks interesting, but I suspect I really don’t have the multimedia talent needed to make good use of it.

Another thing that Chris mentioned was the LinkedIn toolbar. It is supposed to provide a mechanism that automatically pulls up a list of people you know at a company whenever you pull up one of their job postings, according to your LinkedIn connections. I downloaded and installed it on Firefox, but I’ve yet to see it do anything.

One of the hidden gems in Chris’s presentation is a site called SpinStrategy.com (it redirects to timsstrategy.com). It has a number of useful tools for job seekers, including one for connecting job seekers you know with jobs you’ve heard about called Watchlyst. Definitely worth checking out.

One part of Chris’s presentation that I don’t really agree with is a section about controlling Google’s search results. I really don’t see how useful that is to someone seeking a job, and how many job seekers have the time or talent to really make it happen (and can keep it happening on a long-term basis)? I liked the Google Profile idea, but I don’t think Search Engine Optimizing your name is worth pursuing any further than that.

If you’re a job seeker, what do you think? What are your favorite tools?

Facebook seems to be easier to hold conversations on. Discussions on Facebook get captured in threads, allowing them to occur over time rather than relying on a bunch of people all being online at the same time and willing to talk about the same topic.

Discussions on Twitter seem to get lost in “the firehose” – the flood of random tweets coming from all those people you’re following. People have devised all sorts of workarounds (like hashtags and lists) to pull relevant tweets out of the flood, but they all feel like workarounds rather than useful tools.

Most of the people I follow on Twitter have blogs, so many of the tweets I see include URLs of blog posts and web pages. This is the way I sample blogs and get my light topical reading for the day. (I stopped following any blogs a year ago. I got bored.)

I see blog posts and web pages on Facebook as well, but not as many and generally not as interesting to me. (That may be a function of who my Facebook Friends are.)

What about you? What attracts you to one verses the other?