[NetBehaviour] Some thoughts about Linkedin

[Edward]

Dave -

I'm on Linkedin, but the only time I ever look at it is when I get 
a request from somebody wanting to link with me. My thoughts about 
it are "Not another bloody network I'm supposed to keep updating 
all the time." As with all of these social network things (and a 
lot of other things for that matter) I suspect that what you get 
out of it is in proportion to how much you're prepared to put in - 
the more you engage the more you reap the rewards of engagement - 
but there's always a danger of spending loads of time engaging 
with the networking side of things to the extent that you're not 
actually getting on with your work (which is exactly what I'm 
doing now).

As regards the creative work/earning a living balance, I've been 
earning my living doing administrative/managerial work, and 
working creatively in my spare time, ever since I left college. 
Only in recent years has the creative side of things started to 
earn anything, and we're only taking a few hundred pounds a year. 
But I do agree with Joel that working in the 'real world' makes a 
big difference to your creative output. Of course the main 
negative is that you've got less time and energy left with which 
to be creative, and I'd certainly like to be in a position where I 
could work part time (and in a more hassle-free environment) and 
devote more energy to the creative stuff; but the positives are a 
considerable enrichment in the breadth of experience on which you 
draw in terms of inspiration, and the breadth of reference that 
ends up in your work. There's also a payback in the other 
direction: a lot of the skills I've learnt through trying to be 
creative have ended up being employed in my job - knowing how to 
type being the most obvious example when I first left school, and 
website design being the most obvious in the last couple of 
decades.

I might add that the way in which I've tried to square the circle 
of earning money on the one hand and doing creative stuff on the 
other, in recent years, has been to set up a company and actually 
try to market the Dr Hairy series as part of a suite of 
'alternative' training for doctors in the NHS. This has cost 
virtually nothing apart from effort, and it does earn the few 
hundreds of pounds per year that I mentioned before. My point 
being that 'employment' doesn't always have to mean working for 
somebody else, if you can come up with an idea or a product, then 
find a niche of people who like your stuff and develop a way of 
marketing it. Which brings me back to the value of social media, 
which I'm not very good at...

- Edward

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