Dino Baskovic Can’t Lose

I'd solicit Megan Taylor for her resume, if that wasn't such an embarrasing thing to ask for these days.  That's what LinkedIn is for.

Ms. Taylor (I don't know her personally, so I'll default to formal) is the the type of candidate that would play well with the other kiddies in my own corporate sandbox.  That being, a PR department that mixes business with social media.  It's hard to find folks that know web, journalism and communications, those that are solid writers, designers and developers and can actually think, well you know, strategically.

Her resume lists the following skillsets:

AP Style and news editing, HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, Flash and ActionScript, beginning PHP, JavaScript, AJAX, content management and online community management, audio/video editing, Adobe applications, Windows, Mac OS, Microsoft Office, Final Cut Pro, fluent in Spanish

I used to laugh heartily at resumes that laundry-listed talents like this, moreso when I would read job postings for triple-majors that "must know three dozen programming languages, usability, information architecture, art and architecture, landscape architecture, gardening, needle-point and can bowl a perfect 300 game."  Then again, a four-year college degree these days is the new high school diploma...

More on Ms. Taylor and why she caught my eye.  She's interned for Quinn and The Miami Herald, as well as blogs for Poynter and PBS.  Not too shabby.  Her latest blog post entitled "In Search of the Perfect Skillset for a Programmer/Journalist" really hits home.  I, too, am one of those oddball, cross-bred communicators that can both code and copywrite while standing on my head.  What a rush.  It's what got me started in PR, doing freelance web and at one time, teaching both.  I owe my (near) success to my chosen career path, and when I'm not knee-deep in budget or crying over my lost Facebook account, I have a moment to myself to blog.

"In Search of" highlights practitioners of what Ms. Taylor refers to as "computer-assisted reporting" or CAR.  In short, CAR is a relatively new concept, seemingly driven by investigative online reporting and the proliferation of citizen journalists who can tweet train wrecks faster than your average multinational media conglomerate.  The post further explains that CAR types (I'll call 'em that) should have a fair amount of front-end design, LAMP stacking and geomapping under their belt, and throw on some Flash and Final Cut Pro to boot.  Oh, and lest we forget: content management, publishing, editing, writing and the basic tenets of credible and ethical journalism.  (I'll assume she implied that last part.)

The upside to CAR, from my point of view, is that you would most likely be the smartest and most capable member of the newsroom/startup/coffee shop.  You know that much.  The downside?  You probably won't get paid that much.  It discourages me to think that an entry-level CAR type, even with glowing references and a stellar portfolio, may only fetch $40K-60K/year.  Maybe less.  Just five year ago, that number would be double.  And we didn't have fancy web frameworks or a plethora of Web 2.0 widgets at our disposal (read: to learn and try not to break).

I'd be curious to learn more about CAR and whether PR types (like me) should be mindful.  Even more intriguing, what your run-of-the-mill CAR type makes in a year, or per blog post, etc.

And Ms. Taylor, if you're reading: love the resume.  How do you feel about Grand Rapids?

Twitter has updated its Terms of Service to include changes in advertising, spam control and developer APIs.  If the last few years of watching users and the media react to TOS changes from sites like Facebook with pitchforks, then it's worth paying attention to details.  One of those, as clearly highlighted by Twitter's own blog post on the matter, concerns the ownership of one's tweets:

Twitter is allowed to 'use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute' your tweets because that's what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

Ed. note: Reprinted with permission (by me) from LTU Web Design, ISSN 2006212348.  Originally published on March 11, 2008.

We’ve all been there. Deleted a file—or an entire hard drive—and couldn’t recover the data. Sometimes, it’s not your fault. A virus sneaks past the firewall and corrupts your entire PC. Or your laptop bag walks away from you in a busy airport.

It happens. I once lost an entire week’s worth of web site changes, and on one insidious occasion, an entire site. It’s why we keep backups, or at least should. Assuming, of course, we actually can.

Not so much with social networking, as one of my LinkedIn connections recently discovered. With at least one popular social networking site, there is no option to restore deleted profiles, even if by accident.

A cautionary tale
John Pas is a colleague of mine and former boss from my agency days. The consummate sales pro, John keeps a hefty Rolodex and relies on years’ worth of relationship building to do his job. LinkedIn and John were, naturally, a perfect match. He’d built hundreds of connections on his profile, having sent and received many kind recommendations along the way.

So imagine my shock to see John had withdrawn his recommendation of me last night. “Geez,” I thought, “I know I owe the guy a beer or two but this is ridiculous!” As it happened, John was attempting to close an older, inactive LinkedIn profile of himself, and upon doing so, wiped out his current one.

Ouch.

John reports that he’s contacted LinkedIn several times today to no avail. Whether LinkedIn’s customer service can help him remains to be seen. While John’s profile may not qualify as a “mission critical app,” it will will cost him precious time and money to restore his profile should customer service be unable or unwilling to oblige. Like it or not, LinkedIn may be well within their right not to help John. After all, he is contractually obligated to hold LinkedIn harmless, even if it harms his own reputation.

A contract is a contract
It’s common to agree to a web site’s terms as a condition of membership. And I don’t mean to pick on LinkedIn. I know its terms well, which resemble the legalese of most every web site of its kind. LinkedIn has a stellar reputation (to my knowledge) and I remain a fan of its service. I do wish, though, that it had a way to back up my own profile.

Outside of LinkedIn’s boilerplate terms, the only other messaging I could find on the matter comes from its official FAQ:

Be aware that when we close an account, you will lose all of the information in that account, including profile information, connections, and recommendations.

I couldn’t quite find anything that explicitly said “yes, we can reopen your account” or “no, we cannot” so the above statement will have to do for now. And I pause: I have nearly 100 connections myself, a handful of generous recommendations, Q&As and so forth. I can and have always been able to export my connections into an address book format, but my guess is I’d have to re-connect with each and every connection (read: nuisance). I could, uh, save the raw XHTML output for each of my inbox items, miscellaneous notifications, status updates…the list goes on. And then having to re-up on any common-interest groups to which I belong? Again, ouch.

Facebook has a different take on this issue:

If you deactivate your account, your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. What this means is that you effectively disappear from the Facebook service. However, we do save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if you want to reactivate at some point, your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and expect their information to be there when they return to the service.

If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box.

Better, I suppose. Us Facebook users aren’t completely up a certain creek without a paddle. Of course, this doesn’t help John’s situation with LinkedIn. Furthermore, Facebook’s definition of “closed” accounts is not without its share of scrutiny, particularly from privacy advocates. So, now what?

A portable proposition
I do believe that, in the short term, we should call on the social networking sites we use to offer remedial backups of our own profiles. I don’t think this is asking much. Exporting such data to an XML or comma delimited format is trivial at best. WordPress, the platform that powers this blog, offers such an export feature as an example. Heck, it even emails me my backup whenever I want. How nice is that?

In the long term, however, we need a smarter strategy. Enter social network portability, a quitely growing movement to enact industry standards and best practices for transfering data between social networks. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg recently spoke to this during this year’s SXSW keynote. The ongoing conversation is fairly technical, so if talk of hCard+XFN and interoperability makes your head hurt, well–it should. The end result should be a common and simple solution to avoid the very predicament that is giving our friend John his own headache.

As I woke this blog from its two-year slumber, I vowed to keep regular backups of the blog software, widgets, posts and comments. I think I’ll renew that vow. So should you—it’s your reputation, after all. Why not protect it?

Oh, and if you receive yet another invite to befriend or otherwise connect with someone with whom you already thought you had, give them the benefit of the doubt. Like John, they may need a beer, as well.

My Rolodex and two bits barely buy a cup of coffee.  But in this economy, every drip counts.

Need a referral?  Invite me to connect on LinkedIn, or ask for a recommendation and I'll help as best I can.  My contacts range from web and IT to PR and marcoms, some academic and a few engineering.

By no means am I a job bank.  I'm just lucky to have a job and know the feeling of looking for one.  So make a pitch.

While I wait in earnest to reunite with my precious Facebook account, here are 10 things I'm instead doing:

1. Rebuilding my Google account.  Another story altogether.
2. Rekindling my on-again, off-again relationship with Twitter.
3. Linking back into LinkedIn.
4. Playing wiith Posterous.  Wanting to update WordPress.  Missing Magnolia.
5. Changing and encrypting passwords like nobody's business.
6. Backing up data like a summabitch.
7. Catching up on sorely overdue deadlines.
8. Finding a life outside of social media.
9. Making sense of my mid-30s.
10. Eating a ham sammich.