Reality Check

Tips and Tricks for Building your Personal Brand: An Insider’s Perspective

Last week I presented to Women@Microsoft, a group of about 100 or so women that hold monthly meetings down at the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley. It was an awesome group, and I thought I’d post the presentation here.

As a side note – I got called from one of the General Managers at Microsoft to take this job almost based entirely on my blog and also on my twitter account… so you never know what can come from something as simple as building your own personal brand. :)

 

Brand-ology:Tips and Tricks for Personal Branding

View more presentations from laurencooney.

Brand-ology: Tips & Tricks on Branding Yourself from a Chick who Lives It!

Building your own personal brand used to be about a logo, or a tagline. Today it’s changed – now it’s about the picture you have posted on your Facebook account, or the Tweets you send via Twitter during your workday (and sometimes in your off-hours!). Can something this simple make you successful – personally and professionally? How do you build your own personal brand both internally and externally through these Web 2.0 communities? Thought you’d never start a blog? Well, time to think again.

Lauren Cooney will be discussing her adventures on Facebook, Twitter, in blogging, and also in building her internal and external brand at Microsoft. Come prepared for some great (and easy) tips you can use to build out your network, some laughable stories that you can learn from, and great takeaways and suggestions for building your own personal brand.

A Have-to-See: “We Live in Public”

This looks slightly scary, yet hypnotically magnificent. I am going to have to go track down a theater in Seattle to go see this for sure… In watching the trailer, it reminds me a bit of the surreal environment I lived in right after college - San Francisco in early 2000s – the parties, the madness, the money… and then the fall. Wait – or is this a premonition for what we WILL experience? You tell me…

I think this is a must-see for this weekend. Especially since I am expecting this.

Enjoy – and if any of you have seen this – I welcome comments/feedback! /LC

 

 

“On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect it is having on our society as seen through the eyes of the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of, visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.”

Another step in the right direction: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 source code released under the OSI-approved open source Microsoft Public License

On March 18^th at MIX 09 we released ASP.NET MVC 1.0 which helps Web developers build Web applications that are easy to maintain, offer complete control over page markup as well as greater testability.

Building on that release we announced on April 1^st that we are making the sources of ASP.NET MVC available under the OSI-approved open source Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). The Ms-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code. You can read the text of the Ms-PL at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html. The source code for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is now available under Ms-PL in a zip file on the ASP.NET MVC download page.

Here are links to some more informative blog posts on the Ms-PL release:
Scott Guthrie: ASP.NET MVC 1.0
Scott Hanselman: Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is now Open Source MS-PL
Phil Haack: Open Source License For System.Web.Mvc
Miguel de Icaza: Microsoft releases ASP.NET under the MS-PL License

ASP.NET MVC is a part of the ASP.NET Web application framework. For more information:

• · ASP.NET MVC section on the ASP.NET site. Contains lots of video tutorials.
• · Scott Guthrie has a free 185 page tutorial that helps you build an ASP.NET MVC website from scratch.
• · ASP.NET MVC: America's Next Top Model View Controller Framework talk at MIX 09.
• · Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC): Ninja on Fire Black Belt Tips talk at MIX 09.
• · File|New -> Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) talk at MIX 09.

How do you get it? Well, as you know from previous posts, our Web Platform Installer makes it quick and easy to install not only ASP.NET MVC but a host of other products you need to get started building your Web solutions. If you are already using ASP.NET MVC and and would like to educate others we even have an ASP.NET MVC Training Kit to give you a head start.

We hope that all Web developers, including the Open Source community, will be able to leverage our ASP.NET MVC offering to build cutting-edge Web solutions that benefit everyone.

And as always, feedback welcome./LC

Testing Out Windows Live Writer

After all the issues I encountered with Typepad a few weeks ago when we were launching the Windows Web App Gallery and Web Platform Installer, I’ve been trying a couple different types of software to figure out what is reliable, scalable, and easy to post to. Right now I’m in the process of trying to salvage this current blog (Tumblr is looking quite nice if that doesn’t happen) so a few folks suggested trying Windows Live Writer.

So far very easy to use, no delays in formatting, and seems like there are quite a few options for inserting pictures and such (below is a pic from Web 2.0 Expo of Brian Goldfarb and myself, taken by Terry Chay who FINALLY remembered me after a few chance meetings. :) ).

I tend to be a bit ADD about my blog, so hopefully this will get my writing more frequently and having less pain while doing so.  It also includes some cool funtionalities like maps, videos, tables, etc – that Typepad doesn’t.

So here’s the pic (note Brian is loving his “I <heart> Silverlight t-shirt like a CHAMP), and here’s also to another try at Typepad. Let’s see how this works… /LC