How to Use Linkedin to Sell More Books

The book I read to research this post was How to Use Linkedin to Sell More Books which is quite a good book which I bought on kindle. Actually I think this book was a free download. This book focuses on a very narrow field namely selling books on Linkedin and there is very little telling you how to actually use the site. If you want to learn how to use the site I recommend Linkedin For Dummies. This book which is very short just tells you how to make new contacts on the site. Mostly via contacting someone who knows the person or joining a group the person is a member of. There is also a little on how to do searches in Linkedin via the search box at the bottom of the page. There is a little on marketing books and e-books in general. If you are lucky enough to get a publishing contract publishing houses in general do little or no marketing especially for new up and coming authors. I think this is more of an inspiration piece for budding authors than a how to manual. I'd recommend this if it is free but I think even if it is for sale for 99 p there are better books available for the same money. The authors haven't put much effort into it. I also think there are too many books available on selling e-books & I have read lots and found little new here.

Death of the PC

The book I read to research this post was Death of the PC by Matt Baxter-Reynolds which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Apparently it was the case that every 10-15 years there was a game changing event in computing like Windows or the internet irreversibly changing things. That now in the ever more rapid rate of technological change of things is becoming every 7-10 years. Currently there is an invasion of digital devices mainly tablets and smartphones that threaten take away the Windows PC's dominance over the consumer computer industry. In business Windows and computers are still very much the dominant force. Microsoft makes most of its income from the Windows and Office products. They very much still dominate enterprise computing. It's too early to say what the next revolution in computing estimated to be around 2018-2020 will be but we are very much at a junction currently where digital devices are becoming very much lifestyle devices and part of peoples lives. Surprisingly the Chromebook which combines the easy boot up, low risk of virus infection and ability to work from resources like Google Docs on the internet. It has no hard drive and instead uses a cloud service with 100 GB free but has the advatage in common with computers of a keyboard. Currently buyers have been cautious about buying these but that may change as time goes on. One problem is buyers have to learn a new operating system. The dominance of digital devices started with Blackberry which were heavy duty smartphones with minature keyboards ideal for going on the web and answering e-mails. In the future social media is set even more closely with our lives. Android of course dominates the tablet and smartphones probably in part because it is open source and it is possible to buy tablets which are like unofficial products for around $50. Many of these are made in the far east. There are also devices officially endorsed by Google which pay them commision for the privilege.  This book looks at the major products and developments in the digital device industry and I must admit I learned a fair bit from it despite being quite tech savvy. I really enjoyed reading it. It's around 200-250 pages so is a reasonable length.

Typepad

The book I read to research this post was Typepad For Dummies by Melanie Nelson et al which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. Typepad came about as a blogging engine developed for someone's blog which they realised there was demand for and formed a company called Six Apart. The company name is because the couple had their birthdays 6 days apart but anyway it has become a popular blogging service that can be either hosted or self hosted by a company like Go Daddy for which there is a version called Movable Type which is similar in terms of features and the software itself is free. Typepad is particularly good in that it is configurable especially in the Movable Type version and as in a lot of blogging programs is composed of modules. In the Typepad version you can configure it in HTML. In the other version there are other programming languages like Python you can use. This book is a little bit out of date being written in 2010 but does include the substantial upgrade to Typepad in 2009. The biggest upgrade of features to date. There is a basic free option where you get a single blog with 3 GB of space and various paid options which also let you have a customized URL among other things. This is a very good and interesting book I enjoyed reading. In the basic version you are stuck with one theme called Chroma. I think Typepad is better suited to business blogs than personal blogs but it does have various social media modules so you can integrate it with the various sites. In particular there is a friendfeed module which even informs followers of your activity on Amazon. You can do podcasts although due to the increased space involved will probably need a paid membership. I must admit I'd probably have no need to use Typepad but I do find books about the different platforms quite interesting.

How To Make A Killer Linkedin Profile

The book I read to research this post was Linkedin Gold: How To Make A Killer Linkedin Profile by Lance Willis which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is quite short and concise but makes interesting reading and I think is essential reading for anyone interested in getting another job. The book covers a lot more than just creating a Linkedin and covers a whole plethora of useful websites along with their being sections on Twitter and Facebook. If you do a search in a search engine for yourself your Linkedin profile is likely to be highly placed and is important you get it right. You should aim to get at least 500 contacts on Linkedin as then it will display it as 500+ and don't pick people at random but rather give yourself about 4 months to reach it and pick in the same industry who can help you. You should have a professionally done photo, many trade shows have photograpers who will take a photo and post it online for you for a fee. Your profile should look intelligent and include things like a mission statement and where you want to be in 5 years. You should keep abreast of developments in your industry and mention this in your profile. Your current job should offer opportunities to train if not you definitely need to change jobs. More people use Facebook to search for a job than Linkedin which isn't surprising considering the former's popularity. You shouldn't be afraid of asking for recommendations but avoid spamming people. The job seeker subscription on Linkedin is worth getting and allows you to add contacts on the site. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can tell he really knows what he is on about. It isn't a how to guide to using Linkedin for that he suggests get Linkedin For Dummies but is informative all the same. Finally bear in mind your shouldn't post anything on the web you wouldn't want an employer to read and you should always maintain professional standards.

Coming Up - Suede

I am reviewing the album Coming Up by Suede which is their most successful album both commercially and critically and an excellent album. It featured 5 top ten hits including Trash which made number 3 in Britain and was there joint biggest hit. They were an indie band from London who won the Mercury Prize for their debut album and it was also the biggest selling debut by an artist in 10 years. They are probably more of an albums band than a singles band. Fans had high hopes for the follow up to Coming Up which though turned out to be a disappointment and the band split up soon afterwards  reforming for some concerts in 2010. Brett Anderson the lead singer did do some solo albums. Brett had a relationship with Justine Frischman who later had a relationship with Damon Albarn of Blur and would later join all girl group Elastica. My favourite track on this album is probably The Beautiful Ones which iis quite haunting and widely regarded as their best song ever. Suede did later on have problems with drugs but for a while were one of the most promising indie and britpop bands.

Amazon Web Services Part A

This is the 1st installment in my blog post series on Amazon Web Services based on what I learn on the video training course by Infinite Skills on this cloud computing service. Cloud computing is at a stage electricity was at over a hundred years when factories needed to run their own generators to provide power to machinery. This machinery was very expensive and anything but cost effective with any repairs having to be done by specialists who were also expensive. Nowadays we have electricity boards that provide almost infinite power at low cost and we don't have the hassle of repairing generators. In the same way cloud computing offers huge computing power at low cost and in many instances does away with having to build servers and buy associated software. AWS is the biggest cloud provider in the world and is years ahead of its closest rivals. There is even a free tier with any of Amazon's services letting you try before you buy and you are only charged for what you use with things like storage used being averaged out for the whole month allowing for surges in demand. Generally you limit how much you use EC2 or elastic compute cloud which is the most expensive and typically 70% of your bill. Generally Amazon automate what services they provide you in a way that minimizes your bill. There are over 30 services provided by AWS with lots of new ones coming out all the time. Amazon gets a good deal on the hardware they buy for their server farms and do their best to pass these savings on to their clients. They call their server farms availability zones or AZ's and they have them in different geographic zones with the default one you use being in Virginia, USA and a company will typically use at least 2 of these AZ's in case one goes down. Amazon do have very tight security at these locations and operates redundancy which means everything is backed up to several servers so if one goes down there is no outage. EC2 is a virtual server with you needing to provide your own operating system and software. They charge for EC2 hourly. Simple storage service or S3 is your main storage and is used where something needs to be written once and read multiple times. You could run everything with in EC2 but it would relatively be very expensive. You are generally better off letting Amazon sort what services you have to use and charge you accordingly. Some companies even write their own applications to do a similar job to the services with in AWS although you need a very good reason if you do that.

Microsoft Visio 2013 Part J

This is the 10th and last installment in my blog post series on Microsoft Visio 2013 based on what I learn on the video training course by VTC on this software. First we are starting off with publishing from Visio to a web page. You have the work open on your desktop and choose file/ export and choose change file type. You choose the web page option which converts it to HTML. You name the file and click publish. It can then be imported into web design software. You can also save a file as a PDF or a XPS files and there are various software viewers free on the internet for these. You go into file/ export/ pdf or xps and then choose whether you want pdf or xps and there are various options. If you go into review/ new comment you can make comments on a drawing, useful if there are co workers working on the same project. You can also add information to a drawing by using review/ ink which lets you add stuff freehand. This information comes up like a tool tip. You can also click the shape choose pen/ then type of pen ie ballpoint pen. This lets you add information freehand either with the mouse or a dedicated tablet and pen. It can be converted to text or a shape. Using a mouse to enter text is a bit unreliable. If you convert it to a shape which is also under the pens tab it is treated with in the program as a shape and you can apply quick styles or comments to it. To co author with in Visio you need either Skydrive or Sharepoint Server. Several of you can work on the same drawing at the same time but you give co workers permissions to only change what is necessary and protect the rest. There changes come up as updates on their co workers screens. The permissions are normally set by the administrators and the file they work on will often also be a template to protect certain aspects of it in addition. To search for a particular shape you click on the search tab and enter a word in the search box. Various stencils meeting that criteria appear and also their stencil family tab for each stencil displayed will appear. You can click on a particular stencil family or group to be taken there. You can drag a stencil shape to favorites which is empty by default or right or left click the shape bringing up the various menu commands. You can use the save as command to take a stencil shape and customize it and save it in a different folder. It's worth noting Microsoft have various templates which have a vsd extension and stencils which have a vss extension on their website that are often free and quite specialized that you can add to Visio and if you have an earlier version they are frequently compatible with that too.