Adam Darowski makes a great point suggesting that "the blog is the new resume."  Adam is dead on with this one.  Joshua Porter makes several good points including:

• Your blog represents you.
• Your blog is serious business.
• Your blog is an archive.
• Your blog isn’t the only mirror of your life.
• Your blog is your unedited version of yourself.

I have been blogging for a couple of years (Texas Startup Blog) and it has been a very interesting exercise.   I have lost track of the number of job offers or inquires I have received as a direct result of my online writing.  Adam explains:

Blogging is the perfect way for a candidate to give an employer a more detailed sales pitch—to show they can “talk the talk” (as opposed to just fill a resume with buzzwords). I can’t think of a reason for any serious tech professional to not have a blog. Not only does it serve as an excellent notebook for storing ideas and links, but it can come in handy in a job hunt where what interviewers really want to just know what, professionally (and somewhat personally), engages you on a day to day basis. How often do you look at a resume and wonder what exactly the person’s role on a project was? Well, if the person blogged about it then you would have a better idea—and you would know if the role would fit in with your team.

Good stuff… 

If you were heir to the throne of England and you were bitten by the “blogging bug” this is what your blog might look like: The Prince of Wales.

Prince Charles thinks his site is a blog, and perhaps if you were a prince your blog might look a lot like his.  Seems more like a website to me, but alas I am not a prince…  [via]

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Weblogs Work is now part of Big in Japan! It took us a year to determined that weblogs do in fact work, but they are simply one social media tool a business or agency should consider. As a result we have decided to consolidate the Big in Japan and Weblogs Work brand into one with a renewed focus on helping businesses and agencies build turnkey social media programs by providing a broad spectrum of social tools including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, forums and feeds. Don’t worry, the Weblogs Work weblog won’t go away, it will continue to provide a place for the Big in Japan team to blog about social media. Can you believe it has been a year?

On April 12, 2005 I wrote the first Weblogs Work post titled, “Business Blogs the next big thing (that is already here)!” In July we began offering ‘blog consulting’ services to small companies. We also started having our programmers build various tools for our consultancy to effectively host shared and dedicated, single and multi-user blogs. Soon our clients got larger and our projects more complicated. Our programmers started building even more customized tools like elfURL, PodServe, FrankenFeed, InstantFeed and SocialMail. We even created a brand for our social tool effort called Big in Japan.

Almost ninety days ago it became obvious we had a choice to make. We could build an agency and expand our social media consulting practice or we could change our focus to exploit what we were already uniquely positioned to provide. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan are both brands owned by Spur (the holding company I manage). Spur also owns an IT support brand called Architel. Weblogs Work and Big in Japan had been stealing resources (data center space, servers, programmers and engineers) from the very start and it became clear we were very good at building, customizing, managing and supporting various social tools. Very few companies had the experience and resources to do what we were doing on a daily basis.

Just before the 4th of July we bit the bullet and decided to refocus our offering to provide agencies and brand managers enterprise class social tools complete with hosting, management and day-to-day support. Here is an example of our most popular offerings:

• Social Media 101 – A two-day fire starting event for your company. Our trainers will show you how social media tools will change your business through a hands-on training event for up-to 20 employees per event. Includes 12 months of hosted/managed/supported weblog, wiki and podcast services.
• Managed WordPress – Offering a multi-server WordPress implementation allowing for separation of presentation and database functionality. Supporting up-to 512 unique weblogs on two servers. Nightly backups and statistics included.
• Managed PmWiki – Offering a highly secure wiki implementation allowing for up-to 256 unique wikis on a single server. Nightly backups and statistics included.
• White Label PodServe – Offering a unique integrated podcast and telephony tool for your business.

Want to learn more? You can reach me directly at 1+214.550.2003 or just send me an email. We look forward to hearing from you!

I’ve always loved having Like It Matters as my personal blog to use to cover subjects not quite right for Weblogs Work.  Now, I’ve finally started some clean-up on that site, moved it to a more logical URL (http://www.brianoberkirch.com) and started fresh with the latest version of WordPress.  Playing with themes now, but maybe I’ll get one of my rockstar design pals to do something funky fresh at some point.

Here is the new blog.  Here is the new feed.