B. Mann Consulting

Any professional whose work is visible on the Net will become part of the conversation that establishes reputation and creates opportunity. The blog is an active résumé that enables you to participate -- by proxy -- in that conversation.

What an active résumé should include will vary by profession and according to personal inclination. For a musician, a couple of complete tracks from each CD. For a home renovator, photos and write-ups of some completed projects -- and for extra credit, video walkthroughs. For a programmer, links to those of your applications, tools, or specifications that touch the public domain.

Here's the bottom line. What Alf calls "collaborative filtering and recommendation networks" will rival -- and my guess is, largely supplant -- conventional marketing and promotion. But if those networks can't find you, they won't be able to help you.

Jon's Radio: Active résumés

Do I really need to add anything? Perhaps a few points…

Near-Time Flow looks like a pretty incredible product. It's part RSS reader, part knowledge management, and part collaboration tool. I definitely want a copy of this.

Imagine something like a wiki: an information system that simply accepts text and stores it away in a simple hierarchy. Now imagine it accepting that text from just about any source and (here’s where it gets fun) imagine it remembering that source. Say you’re doing web research on "rubber ducks." As you browse the web, you highlight paragraphs from interesting pages and drop them into Flow. Gradually you build your research into a local Flow document. You can annotate that document, adding your own notes. And, if you need more details, you can click on any of the original text and Flow will pop you over to the original web page. The linking works with files, images, whatever (we worked hard on Stu to get him to support e-mail too, but there are some issues with Mail.app to contend with).PragDave: Drop Target for my Brain

It reminds me a bit of the Windows- and IE-only OnFolio, only…better, and for OS X (I think that should be the tagline for most OS X products).