I came across Dopplr in June last year via Web Worker Daily (‘Social Networking Dopplr Connects You When You Travel’ by Stephen Collins) and thought it was a great networking tool for people who travel a great deal:

How often have you thought to yourself, “I’m going to <insert random conference/city/event here> next week. I wonder who else I know is going.” At this point, there’s invariably a chain of ill-timed emails, inevitably missing someone who is actually going to be in the same place as you at the same time. Dopplr aims to resolve this issue through providing a way for those serendipitous moments to be under your control, rather than left to random chance.

After signing up for Dopplr, you enter your upcoming travels, building a list of your movements. As you add connections with people you know, Dopplr comes into its own, letting you, and your connections, know when you will be in the same place at the same time.

Yesterday, while searching for MBS-related blogs, I discovered that in November last year Dopplr opened up its then-in-beta website to business school travellers from a hundred global b-schools (called its ‘MBA 100‘) and that Melbourne Business School was included in that list.

Dopplr’s service has since been launched to the public and, from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty good. I don’t have much use for it myself — I don’t travel much, at least not yet…maybe I will once I get a job — but I’m sure others will find it useful. And who knows, maybe our faculty and Alumni department already use it. I guess I’ll ask.

For more on Dopplr, read this Webware.com post by Josh Lowensohn.

UPDATE: I now maintain this list on its own page.

A few days ago I mentioned to a colleague that very few Melbourne Business School (MBS) students, faculty, and staff members are also bloggers (to my knowledge: two faculty members, three students, and four staff members).

Later it occurred to me that I might have spoken too soon. Yes, I had done quite a bit of research on this in the past — which is why I was confident enough to have made that statement in the first place — but was my statement completely accurate?

To check, I did a much more comprehensive round of research on the ‘net and, whaddya know?, I found some more MBS blogs. Here’s an updated, more comprehensive, listing:

Current Students

• Building a Website Start-Up [mentioned previously]
• Birgit im Abenteuerland [mentioned previously]
• Abroad in Australia: Chicago GSB to Melbourne MBS
• MBA in Melbourne
• The Journey
• David Ryan’s blog at Live Media
• Vineet…exclusive!!

Alumni

• Michael E. Nolan
• Matthew Greensmith from Geek News Central
• Dr. MBA

Staff

• Friend of a Squid

I know of three other staff members who blog but, since they haven’t declared themselves as MBS staff on their blogs, I’m not going to mention them here.

Also, one of my part-time MBA class mates, who is also the CIO at MBS, wrote an blog post (don’t know if he’s going to contribute there regularly) so he also gets a mention:

• Web 2.0 – Behind YOUR Firewall?

Faculty

I haven’t found any new faculty member blogs so I thought I’d list faculty member websites instead. Also, since a lot of our faculty members have their publications listed at the Berkeley Electronic Press website, I’ve included a link to that as well:

• List of authors from Melbourne Business School at Berkeley Electronic Press
• Joshua Gans [Blog, mentioned previously]
• Chris Lloyd [Blog, mentioned previously]
• Marketing Ritson.com
• Michael Ryall
• Doug Dow
• Catherine de Fontenay
• Kannan Sethuraman
• Kwanghui Lim
• John Asker (visiting faculty)

Have I missed anyone? If so, please let me know. Thanks.

Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb posted an interesting article called ‘The Resume, Rebooted: A Look at Web-Enabled Job Hunting‘ in which she covers the latest in dynamic, multimedia-enabled, online resumes.

And while she did cover social networking, she didn’t mention the power of blogs, or even a personal website, in helping people get jobs…though, come to think of it, that could have been outside the scope of her article. Anyway, the jury is out on whether any of this online stuff does indeed help people in the general population get a job. I would, however, contend that, for people in the web world, having stuff about you online is crucial. And if that stuff by or about you is good and positive, that’s even better. After all, on the web, all you often have is your online reputation.

Now that I’m close to graduation, I’ve gotten myself a spot on MBS’ Class Profile Brochure.

The brochure is a quick, personalized overview of the latest MBS graduating batch; i.e. not just a class profile summary of the latest incoming batch. It’s an e-book with eight student profiles per page and will be available to recruiters and employers who want to learn about MBS and its students.

It will give recruiters and employers a good overview of the students who will be graduating soon (i.e. students’ skills, experience levels, backgrounds, languages spoken, etc. — more so than what recruiters can currently access) as well as a means to directly contact the students they are interested in (via e-mail).

This is particularly useful to those companies — notably international ones — that can’t visit the campus to make a presentation or talk to students directly. It’s also a great way for MBS to show off its incredibly diverse student body.

Here — with a munged e-mail address and my Commander Khan avatar instead of my professional photograph — is my profile:

KHAN, Ameel – Pakistani; 32 ameel.khan@edu.mbs English (MT), Urdu/Hindi (Fl), Punjabi (I) BSc (Hons) Computer Science, LUMS (Pakistan) 6 years in IT consulting & management; 4 in development, business integration & marketing of web portals & intranets

Content & Governance Consultant – Melbourne Business School - Conducted business analysis & planned governance for new school intranet Intranet Migration Coordinator – Shell Australia - Conducted project management tasks across teams in Australia, India & USA - Managed the migration of a 2,000+ page US-based intranet portal Manager Tech & Portal Services – Pakistan Development Gateway Foundation - Managed multiple national portals in the development & government sectors - Managed a popular disaster relief info portal after the 2005 earthquake General Manager; GMAT, GRE, SAT Instructor – The Princeton Review, Pakistan

 

FYI: In the language area, ‘MT’ stands for mother tongue, ‘Fl’ stands for fluent, and ‘I’ stands for intermediate user. Meanwhile ‘LUMS’, which is in the previous-degree area, stands for Lahore University of Management Sciences.

So, er, does anyone out there want to hire me? :)

As I cross the three-months-left-to-graduation mark (4 February to 4 May), a number of good job openings have been posted online. Among these, the following three are the most interesting.

Business Analyst Online Projects:

Business Analyst required with 1-3 years experience preferably in an online environment to work with Media Communications organisation. They are looking for a highly motivated, meticulous individual who shares the passion of producing the highest quality and innovative web solutions to clients. [via Seek and ITCom]

Portal Business Consultant:

The Portal Consultant is responsible for gathering requirements for their country customers and developing solutions to meet their business requirements, managing the projects through the development phase, and developing launch strategies and training in support of these systems. [via Seek for realestate.com.au]

Business Analyst / Project Officer Information and Intranet:

Work for a leading government organisation that is seeking a Business Analyst / Project Officer Information & Intranet to be responsible for business analysis of processes and systems whilst providing analytical knowledge and quality support to the business for the HR information system. [via IT Wire and Hudson]

Each of these job openings is for the kind of work I want to do — i.e. more consulting and strategy work than technical work — and, had this been early March instead of early February, I would probably have applied for them as well. One more month to go…

Web 2.0 has changed the marketing landscape. However, not all people agree with that and one of the traditionalists that falls on this old school side is Simon Hammond. Laurel Papworth, meanwhile, teaches people about the power of social media and falls very clearly on the new school side.

Recently, Hammond was quoted in an article in AdNews written by Nina Lees:

Web 2.0 obsessive uptake of social interaction, user generated content control and unbridled interactivity has meant the lunatics are running the asylum. That’s according to Melbourne adman Simon Hammond, chairman of Photon-owned communications agency Belong.

And Papworth…well, responded.

The New York Times’ Maria Aspan has written an article on how hard it is to really delete your Facebook account:

Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

[...]

The technological hurdles set by Facebook have a business rationale: they allow ex-Facebookers who choose to return the ability to resurrect their accounts effortlessly. According to an e-mail message from Amy Sezak, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.”

But it also means that disenchanted users cannot disappear from the site without leaving footprints. Facebook’s terms of use state that “you may remove your user content from the site at any time,” but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”

And thus privacy and data ownership continue to be the most important debate ‘n discussion topics in the evolving social media space.

Excellent post by Jeremiah Owyang about blogs written by Analysts and CEOs. (Note: I wanted to quote pretty much all of his post so I figured it would be best to simply provide the link and not say anything else.)

In the wake of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!, Amy Webb from mydigimedia has updated the Who Owns What list to version 2.1 (available for download as a PDF). It includes the important recent acquisitions by Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, AOL, News Corporation, and IAC and makes an interesting read. [Via Download Squad].

Neat-o-Rama published a fascinating post on the evolution of various technology company’s logos. The timing of this post is fun since we started discussing brands in my Consumer Behaviour class last night and my Brand Management course starts one week from today.