Can you digg it?

Yes, it may look like a misspelling, but it’s not. Digg.com is a wildly popular site specializing in what’s called Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking has its roots in more traditional bookmarking that you probably already do with your browser. You find a site with an interesting tidbit or an interesting story at an online news site, you bookmark it or copy the link so you can revisit it and share it with your friends.

Digg.com and other social bookmarking sites take this one or two steps further. Social bookmarking sites store your bookmarks on the web. What does this mean to you? Well think about all the computers you interact with in the course of a day. Wouldn’t it be nice if all your bookmarks were in one place so you could use all your favorite sites and their services (without having to remember their individual addresses)? Social bookmarking allows you to do this and more.

The more part is that you can also share your bookmarks of interesting tidbits with other people. The site del.icio.us, allows social bookmarking by allowing you to store your links and then establish networks of other people’s links. As a student, you could bookmark your items, share them with group members, or even subscribe to your professor’s bookmarks. Want to know where your prof is coming from? Read what they read.

Digg.com takes this even further by allowing people to submit stories found on the web to a central site. The stories are tagged with keywords to facilitate searching. You can customize the content of your view of digg.com to feature stories on specialized topics, like technology, security, entertainment, etc. The digg.com homepage features the most popular stories submitted by users (as determined by the process of subscribers “digging” the stories). I personally use it to keep my internet news and content in one place and availible to students.

If you’d like to check out my online bookmarks at www.digg.com/users/drbarnett.

Well, thats all I know, and now you know too.

Dr. Barnett

Are You Managing Your Skill Set

Are you thinking about graduation, about getting a job? If you’re a senior in your last semester, the answer is probably yes (it had better be). However, it’s never too early to start thinking about what you’ll do after that fateful day off in the future when you walk across the stage and the Dean hands you your diploma. In the grand scheme of things, this four year period is only a small part of your life and career, you need to make the best of it.

So what are employers looking for? Recent research published in the IT press shows that employers want:

1. Well rounded technology skills. Good communications skills are a must for this field, but technical capability is equally important. Here’s a secret from the pro’s; after you learn your second programming language, the rest are pretty much the same. This holds true of most technology. Oracle SQL is pretty much like Microsoft SQL, which is pretty much like DB2 SQL on the mainframe. A good well rounded skill set (not just the ones you like) will help you outpace the competition.

2. Project Management Skills. CIS isn’t all about coding. Eventually, you’ll end up leading projects. Familiarity with the development life-cycle and quality control methods is critical. One of our recent graduates found herself in this position within months of starting her first job.

3. Critical Thinking. The explosion in data warehousing capabilities and the need to work closely with business means that you’ll be working closely with business elements to define requirements and provide answers.

“We are looking for people who can execute what you ask them to execute. We want them to have an opinion, speak up when they may not be going in the right direction, tell us to take a left here instead of a right to get there faster. Rote workers are not what we are looking for.”

Cited from McAdams, 2007

4. Security Sharpness. IT in the 21st Century must be ever vigilant to security threats. Security has become part and parcel to the systems trade.

You can read the entire article at Hottest Skills for 2007 at the Global Knowledge IT Training site. The article, which is reprinted from Computerworld also contains guidelines for interviewing. Click Here for Article