Linking my forum profile to the community profile

[F._Schubert]

I'm requesting some possibilities to link my forum profile to my community profile (and to my LAVA profile, that would just be great).

I just realized this because in the statistics of my forum profile, I see a 'blog authored', and while I'm bloging on the communities, this isn't reflected.

After some more thoughts, people like me donate a lot of (unpaid) time to make NI products better. Our participation in the forums and the community could be some cheap way to pay it back to us. If a potential employee or contractor is researching about our knownledge, the profiles could be impressive. If we would have linked them better, we could present us in a much broader background (I really do use the different options I have online for different objectives of mine).

Felix

[JackDunaway]

Read my beef here about how the Communities are in direct competition with the Forums. The two entities are sponsored by two competitors, Jive and Lithium respectively, and these two service providers almost certainly have no reason to standardize their interfaces or protocols to foster interoperability. Further, it doesn't seem like NI is able to justify the cost internally to provide seamless, uninterrupted website flow through the different service providers (not in a prioritized manner, that is).

I agree that on the road to standardization, having a SINGLE profile (read, not linked profiles) should be near the top of the list, second only to a single search provider able to accurately index the entire website.

[F._Schubert]

I read your post prior to posting this. I agree that on the long term, a single profile would be cool. But I also like the differences of forums and communities, and having diffrent providers might be the prize you need to pay for this.

I'm more interested in short-term workarounds at the moment. Philosophically I also like to have a cloud identity, so I'm fine with a set of options to interlink my profiles. All the profiles offer some options to link to some web2.0-services (facebook, twitter, icq), the community profile has a field for the forum profile.

I also don't want to just discuss this on a technical level, but in the field of information management. If someone clicks on my profile, what information might this person be intersted in (and which information I want to provide). Well, it wont be a nice woman looking for a data but more likely some other engineer/technican/scientist or someone from a HR department that wants to check my technical expertise in different fields. So for them I would like to display a kind of top-ten charts where I am good at or interested in.

BTW: A personal messanger would be cool for this as well, so I could for example contact someone that was pretty active on the forums for let's say SMTP and directly ask this person if he/she can help my with my own SMTP problem.

I've seen this (some time ago) completley HR related on the joelonsoftware blog, where they where introducing a service (pretty expensive) for HR-departments where they could check the profiles (CVs) against the activity on the stackOverflow.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not currently looking for a job, I target this with a technical knownledge-sharing intention. If I know that a memeber of the forums has some expertise I need, I'd like to have a look if this person hasn't founded a community for exactly this topic before asking.

Felix

[Laura F.]

Hi Felix -

A few thoughts I had:

1.  Others viewing your forums profile can't see the "blogs authored" metric, only you can see that.  We don't have blogs enabled on the forums.

2. If you fill out your "Biography" section in My Settings > Personal Profile you could put additional information about yourself. There is also a field for a web page that you could use to link to your blog posts.

3. If you do choose to put in a link to a web page, you will need to enable others to see it under Preferences > Privacy > Show private information in profile.  Don't worry, this won't display your email address. 

I like your thoughts about interlinking the community and forum profiles and I'll see if there are relatively easy ways for NI to make this happen beyond what I've just posted above.

Thanks,

Laura

[F._Schubert]

Had some more thinking about this. I'd say the most useful would be tagging. I just recently started using it and exploring it's powers.

The ideal tagging would look like this:

• There is a standard to share tags between different forums/communities/other social interactions in web2.0. I don't know if tagging is standardized at all.
• There is an option to configure which profiles to automatically import my tags from (e.g. I don't want a dating site show of in my buissines profile) -> keep my privacy.
• There is a cool presentation of my tag cloud. Say I am dealing with SMTP and SysML, then I would have a big SMTP surrounded by a lot of small tags like SMTP_bugs, SMTP_nuggets which will be close to other web oriented contents like HTTP, while SysML would be a far away big tag surounded by SysML_tools and the like with smaller clouds around like uml. Ok, they show you all these cool pics in the zines, is data mining already that good and is this affordable?

ok, this is an utopia. Do what you can do, Laura and who else is envolved. You already provide a cool (outstanding!) platform.

Felix