Good blogging stories - mini resumés?

The fact that bloggers have advanced their lives in some way due to

- creating a blog
- posting to a blog
- commenting on a blog

didn't surprise me. What did, was that there was a blog post where bloggers shared stories of how they felt a virtual blog or blogging gave them a real-life opportunity that advanced their careers or education. Okay, maybe it's not all that surprising that it was there - maybe the surprise is in just that, I found it.

Just a few good stories that came out of blogging (click here):

I actually am not surprised at all about these kinds of experiences coming out of blogging. I can't tell you how many times I discovered a website, an educator, a program, a tool, and megabytes of information after visiting a blog.

And much that happened in my work (BT before teaching) came from what might be considered a precursor to blogging - the online discussion board (DB).

My good story:

I was hired as a beta-tester and expert to assist users in how to use desktop editing software (motion graphics) when it was fairly new. The dot-com website provided a Q&A DB. Sometimes I would give an example in a link of how I used it (usually from some of my reel material) that visitors could click on and watch.

At that time, I was on an island 45 miles long in the middle of the Pacific fighting for whatever crumbs of work the local digital production industry (long monopolized) left behind. But after the DB was set up, soon, I was getting asked to work on small projects, 2, 3, and even 5,000 miles away. My posts became like mini resumés, with clickable examples of my work. I would talk about this cool special effect, like a glow, and give an example of how I used it on some text. It was meant to help a user figure out how to use a tool. But a professional, such as one who wanted to explore using the tool on his sci-fi alien avatar would see my post and recall that another colleague in the business was looking for someone with my talents on text to do the titles for his documentary on an endangered species. I would periodically get a reply post that suggested I look into a particular job with contact information. Or sometimes an email from a complete stranger in the industry would show up in my inbox asking me if I wanted to be a part of the production team for their motion graphics portion of it.

To make the long good story short; it's hard to believe that I would even be where I am today, in online educational design, if not for ye ol' (ancient - LOL) DB. Nowadays, I don't use DBs or blogs all that much, but I rather prefer the latest - microblogging. It's much more manageable to me, with the same benefits, if not more (not as much reading). I'll talk about that in a later post.