Like a lot of people, I have a set of computer files I like to keep on hand, both at work and at home. At one point I used to move them back and forth on a floppy disk, then zip drive (remember those?), then USB, then later on I’d connect the two computers on a network and use software to synchronize the folder.

Now that we live in the future, the easiest way to maintain synchronized files is to use any of the excellent cloud based file storage solutions and let it run quietly in the background, synchronizing the files I need between work and home. My long time favorite has been Dropbox because it’s incredibly transparent to use and has never given me any technical problems. As I move my digital life to my iPad, I’ve looked at a couple of other cloud-based solutions. Here we go…

Like it or not, business people are stuck with Microsoft Office. Microsoft obviously has the inside scoop on its products and that led me to look at SkyDrive. SkyDrive gives 5 GB of free storage and is one of the cheapest if you want to increase storage – only $10 for 20 GB for a year. A bargain. SkyDrive has a terrific feature of web based editing for any MS Office document. That means you can log in to your SkyDrive account from any browser, pull up your Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document and make some simple edits right there. You get a pared down version of the application that works quite well. Guess what? This online version works on the iPad also. Major headache solved, so long as you are connected to the Internet.

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The last time I demonstrated LinkedIn company pages to a senior executive, with the goal of getting him to do it for his company, he was incredulous that it was free. He was looking for the price tag.
It’s odd that in the rush to cover all the leading social media platforms that companies have neglected LinkedIn. It offers many benefits from a business perspective, especially for business-to-business companies, and the cost is basically staff time.

A LinkedIn Company Page gives a business a sensational opportunity to promote its products and services, recruit top talent, acquire a following, and share important, interesting, and useful updates. Anyone with a company name and company email address can create a LinkedIn Company Page within minutes. The best part is that it’s free and easy. There are many available guides to doing so, here’s one from LinkedIn itself.

The basic format of a LinkedIn Company Page is an online brochure of your products and services. There are visual and attractive design options. Video and other media can be included.

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I’m a good Cardiac Surgeon. At least my friend Dave Dolton on LinkedIn thinks I am. Dave endorsed me as a Cardiac Surgeon to prove a point, the point being you can endorse any LinkedIn connection for any skill, no matter how incorrect or far-fetched it might be.

I am not a cardiac surgeon and my attempts to be one would be I’ll advised. I also don’t consider myself to be an expert at Strategic Partnerships, though I have been endorsed for that twice, once by a person who barely knows me and has never, ever worked with me on strategic partnerships.

These endorsements devalue LinkedIn. Recommendations are great. They take some thinking to do and the recommender will be quite visible, so people take them seriously. Endorsement are like a Foursquare check-in – they take seconds to do and are just for points. They seriously lower the bar.

Yelp has this right for restaurant reviews. You can’t just give a restaurant 4 stars and move on, you have to write a couple of sentences. LinkedIn should be the same, which it is for recommendations, but not for this game of endorsements.

Carolyn Goodman recently tried to see if having many endorsements for a skill makes a person me more of an expert than, the guy who only has a few endorsements for that same skill. It didn’t seem to be taken into account in LinkedIn’s algorithm.

So if LinkedIn isn’t using this, why should we? What’s the point of the endorsement tool? If it’s not being used to rank order skills for those who are searching for that kind of help/expertise, then why offer it? (If you want to turn them off on your profile, this will help you do it.)

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I have vivid memories of the Boston Marathon from growing up in the Boston metro area. The Marathon came right down Route 16 through the middle of Natick where we lived. We used to watch the fun from the top of the parking garage at Newton-Wellesley Hospital where my step-father worked. Later, after college, I lived in Back Bay near the finish line.

The craziness of the bombing and aftermath came as a big shock to me, seeing all those familiar places splashed across the TV screen. I was watching in Florida, a thousand miles away. What kept me in touch were the old standbys, now on Twitter – the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) and the Boston Police Department. It was a jump to the social media age.

When law enforcement agencies finally captured Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the first official announcement wasn’t made at a press conference. Instead, the news was broadcast in two Twitter messages: “Suspect in custody. Officers sweeping the area. Stand by for further info,” read the first tweet from the Boston Police Department on April 19, followed by “CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody.”

Score one for the good guys!

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I read that Google Reader was closing on Google Reader. I have a folder in Reader named ‘Critical’ that contains key feeds from Inside Facebook, The Official Google Blog, etc. and I try to always scan that folder at least every couple of days.

For those of you not familiar with Google Reader, that’s the way it works. You subscribe to blogs you want to follow, and then rather than having to go to the blog to see the updates they come to you on Google Reader through the magic of something called RSS. Then in Reader you can see the headlines and decide if you want to read it or not. If you choose to read it you can read it right there with leaving Reader   You can also share it, tweet it, or save it for later. It’s very convenient.

Google Reader is for info junkies. You can subscribe to hundreds of blogs, organize them into categories using folders and see all the new news. It can be a dashboard to start and end your day. If you fall behind you can just mark everything read and start over again.

I still find Reader extremely useful. In Twitter or Facebook your connections flag significant events and you join the conversation. Assuming your connections are the perfect arbiters and curators of what you’re interested in, you’re in good shape. But Reader lets you handle the fire-hose of information on the Internet very efficiently and in summary format. You can do it on your time, not real time like most social media.

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