In addition to the upcoming Q&As planned for A Storied Career, I’m researching the idea of doing blog carnivals.

Please e-mail me if you might be interested in participating.

I was pretty much past the hands-on mothering stage by the time I entered my PhD program in 2003 as my kids were almost grown and one was already out of the house.

But I remain interested in the stories of PhD holders and students, especially those who share the joys and burdens of motherhood, so I was pleased to see the launch of a new blog within Inside Higher Ed, Mama PhD in which seven women blog about balancing motherhood with academic careers.

Just a few reminders not only if how important storytelling is in blogs but also how to do it well:

Inspired by a blog post in MarketingDeviant by David Kam that discusses marketing as storytelling, Scott Sweeney writes in Man vs. Blog about the importance of storytelling in blogging. Sweeney particularly cites Kam’s words, “If the people remember your story they will remember your business.” Sweeney cites the blogs Dosh Dosh (what strikes me about this one is the nice brevity of the storytelling; each entry is about two paragraphs) and Blogging Experiment as blogs with great storytelling. I haven’t provided a link to the latter because Sweeney says the writing he admired came from the former owner of the blog Ben Cook.

Over at Rebecca Reads, Rebecca Reid asks what aspect of blogging readers enjoy most and talks about her fondness for storytelling in blogging. The focus of Reid’s blog is books, but outside the biblio realm, she says:

In a world besides books, however, I think the story telling I would rely on is blogging. I’m not talking about the world of book reviews online, necessarily. What I really appreciate is personal and family blogs. I’m not going to link to any from here for privacy’s sake, but I certainly love writing about my daily challenges on my personal blog where my family can comment and communicate with me. I love reading about my sister’s and cousins’ lives via an online medium. It’s by reading about their daily lives that I feel connected to them. As a stay-at-home mom, that is the other storytelling I enjoy: the silly things their 2-year-old said, the comments we have for each other about dealing with life. Blogging provides a format to share, communicate, and relate.

Reid also has collected a few blogging/storytelling tips from others, such as keeping entries short, refraining from telling your life’s story, and giving blog posts interesting titles.

The Wall Street Journal's Sarah Needleman recently reported on how blogs are changing the recruiting landscape (this article may not be available free to nonsubscribers for long).

Recruiters are surfing blogs not only for expertise in bloggers' career fields but for writing skills and well-roundedness, Needleman reports. The article discusses whether a blogger should be open in his or her blog about seeking a job. Some say yes, some say no, but I've certainly seen a number of examples of folks getting jobs through directly asking for them in their blogs.

The article's sidebar below is instructive for blogger who are open to being headhunted:

7 Tips for Making Your Blog Recruiter-Friendly

1. Clearly identify your specialty. Include a tagline in your blog's banner so its theme can be quickly recognized. Also, write a concise "about me" blurb that readers can easily find.


2. Show you're current on hot topics. For example, relate a recent news item about your area of expertise to a project you completed and link to tangible evidence of your work, such as a press clipping or PowerPoint presentation.


3. Provide more information. Include a downloadable resume and if you have a profile on a networking site such as LinkedIn.com, link to it.


4. Exercise common sense. Never write about anything negative or proprietary concerning current or former employers.


5. Omit personal information. Unless it's relevant to the job you want, avoid writing about how much you love Fido or the cute things your kids do.


6. Keep it polished and current. Post new entries at least three times a month to show that you're committed.


7. Contribute to other blogs. Insert an inbound link to your blog to draw more traffic and boost its search-engine rankings.

For someone who blogs about storytelling, I don't tell enough stories. I'm reminded of that point by this posting.

Editor's note: This article is the second of two parts.
Part I discusses the pros and cons of using a blog as a resume.

If you've decided you'd like to experiment with using a blog as a resume, consider these tips:

Include elements you can't include in a traditional paper resume. Linked from his blog, The Bryper Blog, social media blogger Bryan Person offers what he has coined his Social Media Resume and notes that the resume include items not found in a conventional resume, such as:

a link to Person's portfolio on del.icio.us (a social bookmarking website), which in turn links to Person's blog posts, podcast episodes, and conference presentations

a pointer to his profile on LinkedIn, a business networking site

a photo of Person

an embedded episode of a podcast, a link to his shared items in Google Reader
(another social bookmarking site)

a link to his photos on Flickr (a photo-sharing site)

a link to messages on Twitter (which enables friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to the question: What are you doing?)

a link to his profile on the social-networking site Facebook

A commenter to Person's blog further suggested an audio or video interview with one of your references as a valuable Social Media Resume component. Others have suggested case studies, links to must-read blogs, and links to buzz and testimonials about the blogger.

Yeah, yeah, I know I've done this before ... a burst of blogging and then a long silence. This time I have fewer other distractions. No full-time job. I'm committed to being a full-time blogger and growing A Storied Career. Hope you'll come along for the ride.

For the first month or so, I'll be catching up on stuff I've wanted to post during my long absence, so dedicated story fans may see material they already know about – though I hope you'll find it presented in a fresh format.

Editor’s note: This article is the first of two parts. Part II provides tips and examples for using a blog as a resume.

Through the use of a variety of online tools -- blogs, wikis, social-networking sites, portfolios, podcasts, Youtube videos, and more -- individuals, especially younger people, are socially constructing their identities in ways unimagined a dozen or so years ago.

Where a dedicated careerist of old constructed a job-seeking identity through a resume and a few other printed materials disseminated to audiences that seem puny by today’s standards, postmillennial upwardly mobile types are establishing their career identities to vast global audiences using the tools of the so-called Web 2.0, defined in part by Web guru Tim O’Reilly as comprising an “architecture of participation.” The concept of Web 2.0 “suggests that everyone … can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves,” writes Andrew Keen in The Daily Standard.

And recruiters are responding. Case in point is the notion of the blog as a replacement or accompaniment for a resume. Sarah E. Needleman reported on the Career Journal site that Ryan Loken, a Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., recruitment manager, had filled an estimated 125 corporate jobs by reading blogs. Well-known recruiting blogger Heather Hamilton, a staffing manager at Microsoft, noted in her blog that “recruiters are searching blogs specifically for resumes.” Recruiters who responded to blog postings on the topic of blogs as replacements for resumes made such comments as:

“We’ve hired two people fresh out of college in the past four months that we found through their blogs -- one didn’t even have a formal resume. Frankly, he didn’t need one. A blog trumps a resume every single time.”

“Our stance is that blogging is important -- at least in our medium -- and we are developing a strategy around it. We are conducting a search for a Marketing Director right now -- if an applicant doesn’t blog, or at least contribute heavily, it’s fair to say that we are going to pass them by.”

The concept of the blog as resume has been the subject of several articles in 2006 and 2007, most of them, appropriately, blog postings with numerous follow-up comments by blog readers and posters. Dave Lefkow’s 2006 entry on ERE.net (a site for executive recruiters) entitled My Blog is My Resume (registration may be required to see the full article), talks about “the changing dynamics of the Web’s second generation.” His article’s implications for job-seekers are apparent in these excerpts:

Privacy is no longer an issue. This generation seems quite comfortable
publishing all of the gory details of their lives online. Some of these details will shock you. Get used to workers who are perfectly functioning members of the work world, but who perhaps make decisions in their personal lives that you find appalling.

Many job seekers, growing up in the level playing field that is the innovation economy, will often expect to be judged by their ideas, not their experience. Resumes will become irrelevant (or at best, a meaningless formality that describes your work history, not who you are).

Why are some employers and recruiters coming to see tools like blogs as more revealing and authentic than resumes? One blog commenter explains: “Think about it -- a resume is one or two pages, of flat, static information. A blog is an interactive space where you can
really see inside of a prospect’s head -- their ability to innovate, think, and communicate. You not only find out what they’ve done for work, but what their passions are, and frankly if they’re the type of person you think would fit into your organization.”

Another commenter noted that the new generation craves personal contact. A blog provides a way to move beyond a resume’s “one to two pages of flat, static information” and create a sense of personal contact. When you reader a blogger’s work, you often have a sense of
knowing him or her even though you’ve never met.

Lefkow’s blog entry and indeed the entire discussion of the idea of blogs as replacements for resumes seems to have originated with an entry on Scobleizer, the blog of Robert Scoble, who noted that he hadn’t needed a resume to get his most recent job and implied that he didn’t expect to need one in the future. Scoble also asserted that his Wikipedia
entry takes the place of a resume. This brief posting elicited 59 comments. Similarly, Adam Darowski in his blog, Traces of Inspiration, submitted an entry entitled The Blog is the New Resume, and Joshua Porter followed with an identically titled posting on his blog, Bokardo, both of which generated extensive comments that provide glimpses into a future in which blogs -- or other tools -- might take the place of resumes ­-- or not.

Darowski wrote, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have more than a vague bulleted list of accomplishments before actually picking up the phone to call the person? There is. There’s blogging. Blogging is the perfect way for a candidate to give an employer a more detailed sales pitch -- to show they can ‘talk the talk’ (as opposed to just fill a resume with buzzwords).”

Porter added a five-point list of the advantages blogs have over resumes, including a blog’s ability to represent the individual, its archival quality, and the blogger’s editorial control over it. One of his commenters noted that the editorial control enables the blogger to
go back into archived entries and update or revise them.

Continuing my discussion about the article referenced in my previous entry, another commenter agreed that blogs are important component of recruiting, in some cases replacing the resume:

We've hired two people fresh out of college in the past 4 months that we found through their blogs - one didn't even have a formal resume. Frankly, he didn't need one. A blog trumps a resume every single time.

Think about it - a resume is 1 or 2 pages, of flat, static information. A blog is an interactive space where you can really see inside of a prospect's head - their ability to innovate, think, & communicate. You not only find out what they've done for work, but what their passions are, and frankly if they're the type of person you think would fit into your organization.

Our stance is that blogging is important - at least in our medium - and we are developing a strategy around it. We are conducting a search for a Marketing Director right now - if an applicant doesn't blog, or at least contribute heavily, it's fair to say that we are going to pass them by.

Yep, a resume is 1-2 pages of flat, static information. With a blog, you can really tell your story; yet, I still believe there may be a way to do the same with a resume -- or some hybrid -- a ResuBlog, if you will.

The discussion calls to mind one of my students, Tyler, who submitted a blog, Tyler's World, as his final project for my business-communication class. And heck, yeah, I'd hire Tyler based on this blog. I gave him a perfect score on it.

As an aside, I'm proud of this little bit of buy-in on blogging that I got from Tyler. The blog was pre-existing, but dormant, and he revived it for the class project. It might just take him places. Note to Tyler: The semester may be over, but feel free to keep up with your blog!

Thanks to my wonderful blog/Movable Type guru, Chris Dixson of Brandego, this blog can again take comments -- as long as the commenter registers (to avoid spam).