I’ve been providing advice on managing your online identity recently, including getting the most out of LinkedIn. Check out the presentation here at the bottom of this post.

Just as a little experiment, I decided to use Wordle.net to create a word cloud of my LinkedIn profile. A word cloud is a map of a piece of text showing the most commonly used words in larger font. I thought it would be interesting to see what my profile says about me. Here it is (click the image to enlarge it, I love that the word ‘geek’ is nestling in the word ‘lifelong’ on here):

I’m quite pleased with this but I could have ended up with a word cloud of boring and uninspiring words – this would have told me to re-write sections of my profile. I’m still going to re-write some sections as I’ve realised that there is some jargon on there!

Why not try it yourself? Just select all the text on your LinkedIn profile (I included my recommendations) and right click and click on ‘copy’, then visit wordle.net and where it says ‘paste a bunch of text’ click paste and then ‘go’ – it will create a word cloud for you.

To save your word cloud, it’s a bit tricky. You need to hold down ‘ctrl’ (bottom left of keyboard) and ‘prt sc’ (top right of keyboard), then open a word document and paste – your cloud will appear and then you can save it as a picture.

You could try this on any other profile you have online of course.

Incidentally, if you’re not yet connected with me on LinkedIn, I would love you to join my network, here’s my profile address: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/bryonytaylor