Chris Betcher

If you’re not blogging in this day and age, are you at a disadvantage? I can see a day in the not too distant future (if it's not already here) where your "digital footprint" will carry far more weight than anything you might include in a resume or CV. It's perhaps not so relevant (yet) in the public education sector where the criteria for employment is not always  based solely on a meritocracy, but in the independent sector there is a definite awareness of an individual's digital footprint as a way to gauge their involvement, passion, engagement and understanding of their chosen field. It may not yet be happening in the public sector because of unionisation and the existing promotional structures in place, but in the outside world where people are employed, promoted and recognised by their actual contributions and not just by the amount of time they have been in a given role, the notion of knowing about an individual because of the trail of ideas they leave behin...

With millions of Twitter messages floating through the Twittersphere each day, you can use the search tool at http://search.twitter.com to find references to ANY word that gets uttered there. So a search for the word "dog" will find every tweet that contains the word dog, and so on. You can even search for your own twittername and see any time your name is referenced online. Many companies now use this search feature to find out whenever anyone mentions their products or services on Twitter. The search tool for Twitter is really quite powerful, and can also be used to generate RSS feeds that can then be embedded into other pages and services. There is some awesome potential there. However, Twitter's ability to search for words being mentioned out there becomes less useful when you search for a really common word, since the search results will invariably turn up lots of stuff you probably don't want. When you're attending a conference for example, you could fi...

The Internet has made it easier than ever to find virtually any digital resource we might want. The ability to locate, download and use a piece of music, a passage of text, a video or a photo for our own use is so trivially easy to do that in the excitement of knowing we CAN do it, we sometimes overlook the question of whether we SHOULD do it.  The idea of the Internet as a place where things are freely shared has become so much a part of our thinking that we sometimes believe we have a right to reuse whatever resources we happen to find online. One of the casualties of this cavalier approach to sharing can be a loss of respect for the intellectual property of others. In a world where everything appears to be so freely available, it is easy to overlook the fact that someone, somewhere, owns these resources.  We tend to rationalise our use of them, reasoning that if people put them on the Internet they must be willing to share them.  And that’s not always true.  Some ...