Advocate's Studio

More on the visual front. I am a big fan of the new wave of visually-inspired resume builders. ResumUP is a new player in this field with a very easy, detailed resume creation tool built on Facebook and LinkedIn. The tool is in beta, but from my view point, works just fine. The resume piece offers great depth in editing professional and educational experience, achievements and career focus, as well as boxes for pycho-social elements to fill out your character profile. The result is quite gorgeous, full of charts, detail and color.

But ResumUP doesn’t stop at your background. You can also make your job searching intentions known on the site, and employers can search and post “visual vacancies.”  The job postings mirror the visual style of the resumes, with corresponding charts and graphics for job description, experience levels, necessary skills, benefits and compensation. Check out some of the sample postings here.

Of course, there is a social piece. You can take advantage of a dashboard when you connect with friends on the site. Plus there are plenty of sharing tools for spreading your resume, with buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. There is a message center within the app. And, you can download your resume in PDF form via the export feature.

I think the idea is quite brilliant – the Web is an experiential place. Offering a visually-appealing means to promote yourself and peruse jobs seems a natural fit for how we interact with information. If you would like a peek at how ResumUP works and looks, check out the video below. And take a few minutes to create your own graphic resume at their site.

I wrote about Visualize.me back a month or so ago and I got my beta invite last night. So, of course, instead of heading off to bed like I should have, I had to play with the new toy. It painlessly and quickly linked up with LinkedIn and, just like magic, a Martha Sperry Career Infographic was born. It is definitely a work in progress – Visualize.me allows you to tweak colors, fonts and backgrounds, which I intend to do, since hot pink is not my color of choice when it comes to a professional presentation. Nonetheless, at least for display purposes, the result below is a pretty fine example of what approximately 2 minutes of effort can yield with this cool new service. My URL is http://beta.vizualize.me/martha. Thanks, Vizualize.me!

Anyone who has spent any time here in the Studio knows I love me a good infographic. When someone offers to combine the visual power of an infographic with my own personal, professional stats and network, I’m all ears and eyes. Visualize.me promises just that: your LinkedIn profile in infographic form. You need do nothing – the application’s powerful coding behind the scenes extracts the information and gussies it up all for you like magic. Visualize.me pulls information about your positions, educational background, interests, recommendations, skills and connections from your profile. It then weights these attributes based on years of experience. The weighted data is what the app uses to create the infographic - your abilities are portrayed relative to your other talents via charts familiar to the infographic design style. The infographic can be customized with a variety of different free and premium themes and templates. The app promises to add the ability to change colors and typefaces, too. Makes me think of those free personal landing pages, like Flavors.me , Doo.id and Zerply. Only infographically-represented.

Don’t get too excited – Vizualize.me isn’t quite open for business just yet, but will be available as a public beta August 1, 2011. Sign up early to get early access and free-of-charge premium features when the private beta launches July 25.

How could I NOT write about this? Hi, my name is Martha. I used to play Tetris. A whole freaking metric ton of Tetris. I used to curse that Microsoft included the habit-forming game right in its operating system. Minesweeper was bad. Tetris was far far worse – the most addictive game I have ever played. But that is all behind me now. Or is it?

Matthew Shoup and Steve Pecko created this dastardly mix of Tetris and LinkedIn. The game, called DropIn, is a great little Java script program that works in your browser. The blocks consist of the profile pictures of your LinkedIn connections. Authorize the app to connect with  your LinkedIn profile, and you are good to go. Just like the classic version, the arrow keys to move and rotate the shapes and then you can slam that puppy to the bottom with your space bar. Just like the classic, you can see the next shape on the right side of the screen.

Sort of like the “building blocks” of your professional networking community. Heh, heh. Couldn’t resist.

Hat tip to Digital Inspiration Blog.

LinkedIn Labs, probably all jovial and such from the success of LinkedIn’s recent IPO, has a new fun tool you can use to visualize your career timeline in a very Memolane sort of way: LinkedIn Connection Timeline. Using semantic information contained with your Profile connections, this little hack creates a visual representation of your connections, your career points and the strength of those connections at a given point in time. Why do it? LinkedIn developer Gordon Koo explains the why of it:

A few months ago, I found myself thinking about my connections and the nature of my LinkedIn network. There was an “aha!” moment where I realized that LinkedIn has a unique characteristic which others lack — it is three-dimensional. The first dimension is the actual connection. The second is the implicit grouping of connections which tie the social graph together. Many social networks have these first two dimensions, but what makes LinkedIn’s network special is its third dimension: time.

Curious as to what your professional life in 3D looks? Check out the tool – it’s live on LinkedIn right now.