Memorganization.

In my group of friends I am the historian. I always have a camera and always have. That means i have about 923838202 photos because that number almost looks like my age. Since becoming job-free I have taken it upon myself to organize these memories into some kind of sense. Because I have spent much of the new millennium with a digital camera, Flickr has helped me to square these memories away into little "sets." I am attempting to do that with my paper (analog!) photos. Here are some ways to go about this and to in other ways make use of your mems:

• Boxes: The photo above shows a birthday present my mom sent me. She organized by year (don't laugh at how many there are) photos from my entire life. The first year she put into a book with cute paper and other information. This is my favorite means of organization because you can get cute boxes (sometimes expensive) that stack easily OR you can use old shoe boxes that you "gift wrap" like you would have a text book in 7th grade. Nah mean?
• Scan: This is a great way to make your memories Y2k compatible and to share them with friends. You can create Facebook albums and haunt friends of yore. With these scans you can also...
• Publish: This is my favorite thing ever. A few months ago some friends and I got together and using Blurb, we created an amazing one-of-a-kind book that spanned years. These make AMAZING gifts and are actually really affordable considering the amazing final product.
• Frame: I moved a few months ago and when I did I made it a point to refresh all of my photo frames. It was starting to look like I was in denial about the fact that it's not actually acceptable to assume I am still 21, so my memorial decor had to represent that. You can cheaply print photos from all of the hosting sites where you likely have your digital pictures and if you'd like, you can go opposite day and just put REALLY old pictures in your frames. It might make you feel young again. Since you don't have a job you can change them out daily. Go for it, dude.

Bottom line, memorganization (as I am calling it) is a good opportunity to acquaint yourself with new technologies, clean up, terrorize friends and decorate your house. Pretty sweet, right?

Post-camp blues.

Yesterday was LaidOffCamp in San Francisco. It was a huge gathering and I had high hopes that I would leave with some kind of amazing inspiration and also a job. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. It was quite unorganized and for someone like me who is overly regimented and likes to plan things to death, I got distracted by the mayhem and had to leave after lunch. However, before I did, I sat through one really informative session about social networking on social media sites and how to brand yourself appropriately. 

John McCrea, VP of Marketing at Plaxo spoke along with Valerie Gonyea, a career consultant. They had a lot of great insight into the job hunt, considering the fact that this is the first major economic downturn with so many efficient tools to leverage one's network. Some thoughts:

• Use people you DO know to make connections to people you DON'T know on LinkedIn. They list connections to certain people who are directly connected to other contacts whose companies are hiring. Request introductions through your contacts.
• When trying to make connections related to a new job, don't go after the HR person but try and find out who the hiring manager is. 
• All networking sites should be accessible to the right people. If you have a personal blog or photo site featuring parties and running around like a freak, make that either an alias or private to only your friends/family. Plaxo has the ability to link all of your sites (Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn) but you can edit accessibility so you're able to share different things with different people. 
• Your brand is the sum total of your education, personality, skills and expertise brought together to form an identity. In order to form an online identity, use a dashboard like Plaxo or Friend Feed to bring all of your information together in one place. And to reinforce this, use the exact same user name and photo.  
• Blog! Twitter!
• Make your "About me" the same across all sites.
• When commenting in forums, create a stamp with links to all of your appropriate sites. Comment intelligently on sites that pertain to your industry. When you sound like a serious expert, you want your LinkedIn profile to be the thing they click on to learn more about you.
• Think about the descriptors that best describe who you ARE personally and what you want to BE professionally. Flush out this description and apply that to your profiles.

So, again, I feel like this was a great opportunity that was in some ways squandered. I know they were eager to have the content generated by attendees but I think some kind of expert involvement and pre-planned programming would have lent itself to a more streamlined experience. Anyway, I tried!