Apple’s iPad is falling victim to the hype machine, creating fanboys and detractors each day. The bottom line is, that like the iPad or not, we need this type of device to support societal changes that are already beginning to happen. This tablet device category, in which the iPad is one of many emerging devices, doesn’t aim to replace your laptop or desktop, not even your netbook. The iPad is gunning to make paper obsolete.

In thinking a lot about the potential of the iPad and other like tablet devices as well as what is happening in our world today, a specific use case for the iPad came to mind. Today I am sharing it with all of you in the hope that we can make it a reality.

One of the most antiquated pieces of paper right now is the resume. People talk about how computers and technology have become a critical component of of most jobs. If this is the case, then why are most of us walking around with paper resumes and no way to actually showcase the work we do?

Lets change this.

Now Is Finally Time
I believe that this is a problem that hasn’t been able to be solved before, because we didn’t have the technology to solve it. Companies like Visual CV have tried. The problem is that these service besides lacking important features, were meant to be consumed by someone in front of a computer. Computers aren’t around in most job interviews.

What If Every Job Seeker Could Present Like Steve Jobs?
The biggest issue with LinkedIn and Visual CV some of the most popular digital resume services, is that they have no presentation aspect. When Apple unveils a new product we are all in awe of the presentation and the fan fair of this new invention. What if we could all be Steve Jobs when we present our most important product: ourselves. The iPad gives us that ability.

This idea started after seeing what Wired has planned for the iPad.

Changing The Employment Game
Imagine if you walk into a your next job interview and instead of unzipping a folder and pulling out a paper resume, you took out an iPad and your resume looked something like this:

Imagine with me here that you walk into a job interview. First you introduce yourself. Next you take out an iPad and set it on the table between you and the person interviewing you. You turn it on and your resume appears, but this isn’t the same boring text resume that you have always used (though it is there if they want to see it) Instead they see a clean screen with different skills sets they had identified as being important to the job.

You touch an icon that is about communication skills and it opens video of you giving presentations, along with slide presentations that you have used in the past. This completely changes how people get to present themselves. Imagine that you are an accountant and could open a spreadsheet to show an example of an important problem you solved with just one touch.

If someone walked into meet with you and did this, wouldn’t you hire them? I would. Better yet this information actually tells us what the person can do, unlike an hour of idle chat and trite questions.

Whose Coming With Me
It is up to us, the early adopter community to help make this a reality. This couldn’t be done before. The iPhone is to small and laptops are too clunky. The time for this solution is now.

Do you want to help make this happen? Then e-mail me: kipp.bodnarATgmailDOTcom Do you want to use an app like this in the future to help land a job? Then please leave a comment below.

Power for laptops and cell phones is always in short supply at events. This mini power strip with outlets and USB ports is a travel must for me.

This is a great recap by my good friend Wayne Sutton about this past weekend’s Word Camp in Durham.

14 things I learned about Matt Mullenweg and WordPress at WordCampRDU | Social Wayne, Wayne Sutton ‘s Blog.

If you don’t have time to read his post my big conclusions are:

1. Videopress is a game changer. I may start using it for all of my video hosting o nthe Web. The player is great and open source. Matt says we wil lbe able to customize it in the future.

2. P2 as a theme is a brilliant idea. It basically also you to blog super quickly from your page without going to the dashboard. I like it so much I have started to use it on my personal blog: KippBodnar.com.

3. WordPress is rewriting their iPhone app from the start and it sounds like it will be a huge improvement!

A big thanks to everyone who shared knowledge at Word Camp RDU!

I spend a good bit of my free time creating content online in all forms: written, images, and video. One of the questions people most often ask is what type of video camera do you use? or what mic are you using? The short answer is, that it doesn’t matter. Equipment doesn’t make your video more interesting, you do. I think a lot of time we get caught up on the equipment, so that we don’t have to focus on the hard issues, like being interesting.

I suggest that you use what ever you have to get started and as you get better at creating good content you will figure out what the next best step in terms of buying equipment is for you. But this doesn’t answer the bigger question of: How do I make sure I am interesting?

Here are my ideas:

• Be yourself – If you try to be someone else it will be clear and you will be irrelevant.
• Establish a “trademark” – Create a saying, style, or prop that is unique to your content.
• Learn from others – Look at the content creators that people are most interested in. What are they doing that others are not?
• Understand you audience – It is impossible to create relevant content if you don’t know who you are talking to.

Bonus:
Here is a quick video Wayne and I did at SXSW to talk about how to live stream. Should give you some basic how-to information:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sometimes I feel the need to write quick and short musing posts about the web after having a quick random thought. This is one of those posts.

Since the beginning of the social web economy savvy start up entrepreneurs have had to face one major obstacle in their quest for fame and riches.  By their nature social web applications need a large population of users to become useful. So how to you get users to use a service before their are really enough people on it to make it useful? This problem has been the downfall of many great ideas and million is venture capital funding.

However, I think that this is a problem that is STARTING to go away for two reasons:

1. Location:
Location based technologies and the rise of the mobile web offer a lot of solutions to the problems of getting users because you can now use real world locations as “users” and let people find new friends that they hadn’t discovered before. By populating new connections around places, the need to have “old friends” on new networks will decrease greatly.

2. Facebook Connect:
Love it or hate with its recent changes to its API Facebook is quickly become a defacto social ID for the web. Which means new web services will be forced to use Facebook Connect in their service because of it marketing and user population potential.

Neither of these change the web’s obsession with piling up new users for each service, but they do offer a change to previous approaches…

This week marks the start of one of the years biggest interactive conferences: South By South West Interactive in Austin, TX. While this will be 5 days of none stop discussions on all things related to interactive communications, social media and the future of the web, not everyone can make it to Austin.  In this difficult economic year many people will not have the time or the resources to make it. Because of this I have put together a list of the best ways to follow all of the SXSW action online.

1.Twitter Search

This first one is a no brainer. Twitter has been a staple of SXSW for the past two years and don’t expect for that to change this year. Twitter Search will be a never ending stream of interesting information coming from Austin. I suggest using Tweetdeck, Tweet Grid, Twitterfall and open searches for #SXSW and #SXSWi and watch knowledge start dropping.

2. SXSW FriendFeed Room

If you are looking for a one stop shop for all forms of media surrounding SXSW and you want it all in one browser page than I recommend you take a look at the SXSW 2009 FriendFeed room which has many contributors and pulls in Twitter search feeds as well as other relevant info related to SXSW.

3. Talks Social News

So this one is a shamelss plug, but I had to do it. Wayne Sutton and I will be posting lots of pictures and videos as well as doing daily podcast episodes from Austin on our podcast website TalkSocialNews.com. If you want SXSW information then we have you covered with our own unique take on the conference.

4. Google Blog Search

This may seem like a simple one, but if blogs are you thing, I recommend setting up an RSS feed for “SXSW” blog search results in Google Blogsearch which should deliver any SXSW related posts straight to your feed reader. For extra credit try multiple search terms like “SXSWi” and “South By South West Interactive” and blend them into one RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes.

5. Twitter Local

One Twitter related service that flies under the radar is Twitter Local.  Download the Twitter Local desktop application and then enter “Austin, Texas” and it will delver you a constant stream of tweets from every one in Austin including the 12,000 people at SXSW!

6. SXSW.Alltop.com

Alltop is an aggregation site started by entrepreneur and author Guy Kawasaki. The site has pages dedicated to aggregating information on a variety of subjects including SXSW. The Alltop SXSW page offer Twitter search results, Del.cio.us tags, Google News and many other sources of information all on one browser page.

Sure their are other ways to track SXSW, but to me these are the best ways to aggregate information related to SXSW and it is almost as good as being there. If you happen to be reading this and are attending SXSW please travel safely and I look forward to meeting you there.

P.S. If you would like to meet at SXSWi sending me a reply or a direct message on Twitter is probably the best way to connect!

FriendFeed is a service that I did not adopt right a way. Mainly because I didn’t appreciate the value of what it had to offer.  When I first registered, they didn’t have many users.  In the past few months I have come back to FriendFeed and realized its value as a platform to discover news and have micro conversations around news, images, and videos. I am not a FriendFeed cheerleader we know their are many our there (“*cough* Scoble and Rubel). I think FriendFeed has many faults some that can be improved on by feature upgrades and others that are just a product of what the service is.

I am not sure if it will ever become a “mainstream” web service, but I don’t think it needs to be. I think it can serve the niche of information thirsty early adopters and some mainstream folks and become profitable.  That being said I think it should replace some of an individual’s RSS or news reading time, because it allows for very good news discovery.  The conversations that happen on FriendFeed around news help to shine new perspectives.

I made quick video to talk about this in more detail and to serve as a how-to guide for people interested in learning more about FriendFeed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last week, I sat in front of the computer and watched one of the best interviews on technology, innovation and the social web that I have ever seen.  Marc Andreessen’s interview with Charlie Rose was a captivating and engaging view into one of the pioneers on the web that developed technology that directly impacts how we all use the Internet today. Andreessen is brilliant and has his own absolute idea of the future and you can tell through his investments that his bets normally win.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of my takeaways from the interview is that many of us on the social web have lost our vision. The information overload provided by  social web applications has led us to become obsessed with “right now” and any vision of the furture we have is limited to thirty or sixty minutes ahead and not much more. I was captivated by Marc, not just because he his brilliant, but because I needed to fill a vision craving that wasn’t being filled else where. The social web as we know it today is in the beginning of its infancy.  It will see huge changes in the next 5, 10, 20 years, but few spend time talking about this. We hear talk of next week or maybe next month, but we get too swallowed up in the current “buzz” to step back and think about how we can build a social web that has meaningful staying power and application. I am going to make a concerted effort on this blog to examine ideas for the future and to look at exisiting and potential technologies that can solve problems and solidify the next generation of our economy and relationships.  I hope this post encourages you to do the same? Do you agree, are we losing our vision? P.S. If you read this and know Marc please tell him to start blogging again! His posts are great and we need more commentary like his.

Just like everything else in life, social media isn’t free, far from it.  Free is the lure that got most of us started in social media and the fact that it was new and shiny didn’t hurt either.

Free Applications: The Gateway Drug
We are all lured into participation in social media by the idea of free, but though the apps are free, being active in social media isn’t. Lets do a quick break down a some realistic costs for being active in social media today. For many people free works, but for many others free leads to the need to “upgrade” both hardware and software.

So what does it really cost to have a blog, share videos and photos, be active on networks like Facebook and Twitter?

The Breakdown:

Equipment Needed:

• Computer: $500 – 5,000
• Camera: $50-$2000
• Smart Phone: $50 – $400
• Cellular Data and SMS plan: $20-$60 per month
• Video Camera: $80 – $5,000
• Photo and Video Editing Software: $200 – $3,000
• Bags, cases, tripods, and accessories: $50 – $500

Software Related Expenses:

Blog: Price Tag = Entry Level – Free (blogger, wordpress.com, tumblr.com, etc.) Mid Level – Paid $5-$15 per month (not selfhosted: Typepad, Squarespace, etc) and Top level – Hosting ($5 to $100 per month)  Design work or premium themes ($50 – $30,000 in fees)

Paid Media Sharing Web Applications:

Flickr: $20 per year
Vimeo: $60 per year

So if you take the low end of all of my cost esimates from this post you are looking at a cost of $1,325 to equip yourself in the first year with the entry level equipment and services needed to be an active online participant and this does not include the time investment that goes with that price tag.

Are you ready to make the investment is takes to equip yourself?

What other costs did I forget? Anybody think I am offbase with this post?

I have recived a lot of questions lately about Brightkite recently and why people should use it. Here is a quick walk through video of the interface and a discussion on the value of using the service.

Click here to view the embedded video.