Jason Spector.com

As many of you may have noticed, my presence on this site lately has been a little sparse. Since my fun wrap up of 2009, a lot has happened and I took a small hiatus to soak it all in. In short, I’ve made the move from an employee to an independent consultant and entrepreneur . Why? To be honest, it was thrust upon me as so many others before me. And like many others before me, I took it as an opportunity to explore what I want to do, where I want to be and how I can make the greatest impact.

But before we look forward, we should take a look back…

As we wind down 2009, the blogosphere is a buzz with end-of-year posts. Everyone wants to finish up on a high note and why not? We’ve all watched, learned and experienced many things and events that we never would’ve even considered this time last year.

Now it’s my turn. But what to write about? Hmmm….

As job losses and business closures continue to increase, more and more people are turning to social media to give them a boost – both in the job market and as a tool of self-promotion. There isn’t a place more evident of this trend than on LinkedIn, where the site’s foundation is based on business and other professional connections. Looking through my connections list, for example, I see a sharp decrease in business names under “Company Name” and an increase of more generic terms like “self-employed” or “independent consultant”.

Seems innocent enough, but what you may not know is that labeling yourself this way adds you to the growing number of employees of the “Self Employed” company.

HootSuite, my preferred Twitter client, recently upgraded their app with several new features, some UI tweaks and a few minor design changes. The long-awaited and highly-anticipated updates were the LinkedIn, Facebook and Ping.fm integrations as well as Twitter Lists. What prompted me to write this post, however, was a single subtle change that I imagine many users might not catch. But being the type of UX guy that I am, it drove me a little nuts. I’m referring to the updated character count of the twitter posts.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with fellow Pittsburgher, twitter pal and social media maven Michelle Chmielewski, otherwise known as the The Observing Participant.

We discussed many topics about crowdsourcing and social media, but the focus was primarily on how successful crowdsourcing coincides with a healthy respect for the “Three C’s” – the Client, the Crowd and the Competition.