You pat my back and I’ll pat yours on LinkedIn

What do you think about LinkedIn endorsements? LinkedIn introduced these in September, as an easy way for you to recognize your contact’s skills and abilities. Sounds like a good idea at first blush, but do these click-recommendations really mean anything?

Many LinkedIn users think not and are annoyed by the feature, and they’ve been saying so on the site itself. Forbes refers to them as "The Stove Top Stuffing version of recommendations." The general impression is that these endorsements can’t be taken as serious recommendations and that, if you want to recognize someone’s abilities, you should take the time to pen—or type—a recommendation.

I started getting emails about people who had endorsed me some 3 or so weeks ago. Fortunately, these are from people I actually know and who know me professionally (well, almost all). I don’t have dozens of endorsements. And I admit I’ve fallen for the box that pops up when I log into my account, asking me to endorse some of my contacts—I’ve endorsed some, but by no means all -- only those I can vouch for and I would stand behind that endorsement. But then, I am only connected on LinkedIn to people I know and whose work is relevant to mine – apart for a very few exceptions who are friends rather than colleagues.

But some people are being endorsed by complete strangers, which is silly and meaningless.

As this light-recommendation mode gains further momentum, can one really ignore it? If you don't play the game will you be sidelined when it comes to finding a new job or contract? I’m still undecided.

The Divided States of America

“We are all Americans.” – whether Romney or Obama -- or both--proclaimed this, the US media coverage of last Tuesday’s elections seemed to put that to the lie. What we heard-- and what struck me-- from all commentators, on all networks, was not "American voters", or Florida, or Maine, or Utah voters, but white voters, black voters, African-American voters, Hispanic voters, Latino voters, women voters, youth voters. In the following days, analysts further divided these into Christians, Evangelicals, non-Christians.

The melting pot most definitely is not. And the media offered sheets of statistics to back that up.

The headlines on the Web in the days following the election pored over the new demographics.

• A Racially Polarized Country: White Men Lose One, claimed a blog on racismsreview.
• The New America: What the election teaches up about ourselves, said CNN Politics
• Presidential elections show we are far from being 'united' states, read analysis by AP on the pennlive.com site.
• And so on, and on, and on.

Nowhere, however, was the electorate parsed by income. The word "poverty" was not one of the factors examined. I'm willing to bet that the balkanized voters would seem a lot more homogeneous if the mean family-- or personal-- income was applied. Poorer people -- the hispanics/latinos and blacks among them-- more than likely voted for Obama. The rich white guys, well, they went the other way.


Back in 2008 journalist Bill Bishop wrote in The Big Sort that  you could tell how people would vote by their zip code. This was a somewhat sophisticated version of "birds of a feather flock together" theory.

Perhaps he was right. Certainly his thesis was picked up in The Tennessean where Chas Sisk analyzed voting patterns in Nashville. He quotes Marc Heatherington, a Vanderbilt University professor, who said:

"People aren't choosing to live because of their politics, but where they are choosing to live seems to be highly correlated to their politics."

I find this worrisome, not just for the US, but for Canada. Did we not see similar patterns start to raise their heads during the last elections when candidates and parties set out to win "the ethnic vote"?

Bullies 1, school board 0

The Ottawa media last week debated the pros and cons of the cancelled trip to Ohio by Catholic Orleans students. Was the trip partisan? Was it pro-choice? Why not hitch onto the Romney campaign instead? Why study American politics? Did the teacher have a hidden agenda?

There ensued learned discussions about the value of civics education, about experiential learning, about the need to keep politics out of schools, about Canadians messing in US elections.

Jeff Spooner of The Ottawa Citizen referred to the cancellation as “an illustration of everything that is wrong with the much-praised social media.” But social media had its up-sides: the day after the cancellation, students began a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #TeamSearle to clear the name of their teacher fingered as the culprit in planning the trip.

One point seems to have been overlooked in the numerous reports I read and heard: the school and the board caved in to bullies. After all, the cancellation resulted from anonymous comments reported in an article on a pro-life website. Isn’t that much like what the cyber bullies have been doing to school kids?

So instead of using the comments as a teachable moment about staying the course with your plans, defending your beliefs, ignoring the nay-sayers, the kids learned to give in whenever someone criticizes you, even anonymously. So when these schools teach kids to stand up to bullies, aren’t they being hypocritical?

What makes a really good kid's book?

I bought a novel today-- Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. And yes, I bought it for me. It came very highly recommended by my eight-year-old grand-daughter. And she's a pretty good judge of what makes a good story. Her opinion is backed-up by the Newberry folks who made it an honour book. It's also won many other awards. And it's been made into a film a few times already.

But I'll wait until I finish the book before seeing the film. As my grand-daughter recommends.

That raises the question of what makes a really good child's book. Or what makes a kids'
book great?

Speaking at an  inaugural children’s publishing conference last May 31, in New York City, Richard Robinson, President and CEO of Scholastic Inc, the kids' book empire, said that a great book is…

• One that contains a simple and original idea presented with clarity and great power.


• One that connects with the reader, asserting its world directly into the reader’s mind.


• One that makes the world seem larger and more interesting.


• One written with humor and a light touch.


• One that is a realization of a complete but very different world.

That could apply to books for all ages, not just kids. Kids interviewed in an un-named survey thought fun and funny were important, as well as a resemblance to their lives. That would explain the shelves full of Judy Blooms and similar authors. My grand-daughter did think the Junie B. books were funny when we read them together a couple of years back, but not great. She lost interest quite quickly, to the relief of her father who worried she may take lessons from the irrepressible Junie.

 

Certainly kids' lit is a booming business-- the Frankfurt book fair is testament to that. And one that has not yet shifted to digital in any big way. Can it be that the bulk of buyers are grand-parents who can't quite fathom snuggling down for a bedtime story on screen?