Status-Q

Rose and I invented a new word this week. It’s a technical cycling term, so may not become widespread, but I think we may see rapid adoption of it in East Anglia and the Netherlands.

ishybutt (ˈɪʃibʌt) (also ishibutt)
noun the experience of sitting on a bicycle saddle, only to discover that it has been raining.

Hope you find it useful in daily conversation.

John's been writing about the somewhat bizarre practice of LinkedIn 'endorsements', where you can affirm that an acquaintance really has the skills they say they have.

Well, frankly, I wouldn't, in the first place, link to anyone I thought was likely to lie on their CV. I'm old-fashioned enough to remember the days when a LinkedIn connection was meant to imply some sort of endorsement in itself.

Interestingly, you can also endorse people's expertise in skills they never knew they had. I never listed any on my LinkedIn page until some kind friend said I was awfully good at 'Architecture', which I assume they meant in the sense of 'computer systems architecture', but, who knows, perhaps they had seen my old garden shed modifications? Hoping for some interesting job offers from that one.

It is, of course, a brilliant marketing trick on LinkedIn's part. In a world where page hit numbers are everything, it's hard to imagine a better email campaign to make users feel obliged to come back to your site over and over again.

When it all started, I added 'LinkedIn Endorsing' to my list of skills, and a couple of friends have kindly endorsed my abilities in that area. So maybe, by way of bringing a little festive cheer, I should be endorsing their LinkedIn-endorsing-endorsing?

Oh, and Happy Christmas, everybody!

For some years, I had a handy sign-up form on the right-hand side of Status-Q allowing you to receive new entries by email, thanks to the good folk at FeedMyInbox. Sadly, they’re going to be closing down at the end of the year. As an alternative, you can use IFTTT to create RSS-to-email recipes.

However, since the most-used RSS reader out there, by far, is Google Reader, and the various apps that can sync with it (my current iPad favourite being Reeder), I’ve replaced the FeedMyInbox link with an ‘Add to Google’ button, so it’s dead easy to include Status-Q in your Google feeds, should you so desire.