North Country: St. Lawrence County

"North Country" is the upper tier of counties in New York state bordering Canada and including the northern part of the Adirondack Park. It's a very rural place, and very special. All the pictures below were taken in St. Lawrence County, ranging from abandoned farms in the town of Hammond to a Civil War re-enactment in Massena. Most of the water pictures were taken around Morristown, looking over to Brockville, Ontario, on the Canadian side of the river. I hope you can appreciate the great beauty here, and not just in the sunsets. I have a few additional notes at the bottom of the post, after the photos:

I've been coming here on a regular basis for most of my life, and have many relatives who live or summer in St. Lawrence county. Change is slow. Sometimes it mirrors what is happening elsewhere in America -- seemingly everyone has gotten a mobile phone, "for sale" signs are commonplace, and Wal-mart and national franchises dominate the retail landscape on the outskirts of Ogdensburg, Massena, and a few other small cities. But sometimes the change is unpredictable. In the 1990s, Amish started buying cheap farms in the North Country, and now they are ubiquitous. The influx has somewhat offset the downward trend in the locally born population, and have helped to reinvigorate the farming economy in St. Lawrence county.

Images: I am licensing the photos of St. Lawrence County under Creative Commons 3.0 CC-BY, which basically means you are free to copy them, place them on your own website, use them for commercial purposes, and adapt them, as long as you attribute them to Ian Lamont and link back to this post on ilamont.com.

The graphic of the North Country counties was uploaded to Wikipedia by Jondude11. I am reproducing it here under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, as described here.

Visualizing your professional LinkedIn networks

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This is cool. LinkedIn has developed a visualization for members' professional networks. I spotted an example on a blog that I was browsing, and was curious to see what turned up for me. I was kind of surprised by the results:

What's going on here? In a nutshell, my map reflects two major networks I am a part of: My MIT Sloan Fellows class (blue) and IDG Enterprise (orange).

The Sloan Fellows group of about 100 people are so connected with each other (i.e., nearly everyone is connected with everyone else in the group) that the lines between them form a nearly solid mass of blue. A few people on the outside of the blue mass are MIT students from other programs (e.g., the two-year Sloan MBA) who have a few connections with others in my class.

The orange network consists of former colleagues at IDG Enterprise -- mostly editors and technical staff but also some business executives. There are also many lines between them, but not nearly to the same degree as the Sloan Fellow network. That's because the IDGers are more likely to be connected to people in their own publications (Network World, Computerworld, The Industry Standard, etc.) and/or to people having similar roles (editors with editors, developers with developers, etc.). As I worked at three IDG publications and in many cross-functional teams from 1999 to 2010, I am pretty well connected across these groups.

There are some interesting small groups near the center of my galaxy. They aren't necessarily close to me; rather, it appears smaller networks (light orange, green, and magenta) or single connections (gray lines) are shown nearer to the center of the visualization. The colored networks include a group of a half-dozen people (green) I met at the State of Play conference in 2007 and connected with on LinkedIn immediately afterwards. I haven't had much contact with any of them since then.

Another group (magenta) consists of high school pals who I have had regular contact with over the years, but are barely noticeable on the map, owing to the fact there are only four of them. Actually, there should be five magenta dots, but one of the guys who is connected with me is not connected with any of the others, and therefore shows up as a single grey dot -- even though he happens to be one of my closest friends.

Not reflected at all is my extensive network in Taiwan, which I developed over a six-year period in the 1990s when I lived in Taipei. If it were visualized, it would have about 20-30 people with slightly less density than my IDG network. Why isn't it there? Two reasons that come to mind are the network predates LinkedIn by many years, and many of the people who I know from that period of life are Taiwanese and are therefore less likely to be LinkedIn users (social network usage in Taiwan evolved much differently than it did in the U.S. and other countries). While I have still connected with about a half-dozen people from my time in Taiwan, they show up as gray dots because I knew them from different settings (social, music, different jobs, etc.) and they are not connected with each other.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting visualization and makes me wonder if I need to develop other professional networks in new ways. You can try it out by visiting InMaps, which will require you to authenticate through your LinkedIn account.

How to become a good writer

I have a one-word piece of advice for anyone who wants to learn how to write:

Blog.

Don't worry about which software to use, how to customize your template, or how to promote your thoughts. Just find a service that lets you start writing right away, and then start writing about what interests you or inspires you.

If you feel intimidated by formatting or structure, a trick that works well is pretend you are writing an email to a friend, explaining to that friend something that he or she may not understand very well. Real friends or strangers may start to read your posts. How do they respond to your presentation of facts, observations, and arguments? Use the feedback to tweak your approach.

Your organization and "voice" may seem awkward at first, but regular practice -- every day, if you can manage -- will help you develop your skills. After 100 hours you'll notice a big improvement. After 1000 hours, you will be well on your way to being a master.