We’re Back!

Well after a break of several months while my wife and I relocated from Prague to Wellington, New Zealand Sean and I are back with the regular Trailing Spouse Network Talkcasts on Talk shoe.com Listen to todays show here:

On todays program we talked about some of the expat web sites that we’ve been looking at recently. Internations www.internations.org is a community based site for expats, locals and travelers with over 200 active communities in cities all around the world. A great resource for researching a location before you arrive and for building social and business contacts.

While talking about Internations and researching potential overseas postings we reminded listeners about Talesmag www.talesmag.com a reliable resource of “Real Post Reports” and great stories from Tales from a Small Planet.

Sean’s been looking at Expat-Blog.com and reports that it seems to be a good source of expat related blogs from around the world accesible by region. Blogs need to be registered with the site and they have rules to keep the content relevant. There is also a forum, not localized in any way and covers all sorts of expat issues. Certainly worh a look from time to time.

Trailing Spouse Network member Sebastien Deschamps is the co-founder of Expatfinder www.expatfinder.com the next site that Sean took a look at. Expatfinder is a search engine focused on finding expat related information on the web and in Blogs. Sebastien is also community manager at expatangels.org a network of mentors and organizers helping improve expat living.

On a more edgey note, Sean has been reading the Diplopundit, a site about life in the Diplomatic Foreign Servive (US) and a range of foreign policy and related subjects.

We had some discussion about social networking tools; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I’m not sure if I “get it” when it comes to Twitter, I guess it has its place but it’s very much ‘in the moment’ communication, I haven’t used it as a reasearch tool but I did promote this talkcast via Twitter… we’ll see if Jeff continues to tweet…or is that tweat? Follow Jeff on Twitter and follow Sean on Twitter.

Facebook gives me greater cause for concern, the data that is collected about users on Facebook is scary and it’s reach is deep given the trusted relationships that exist between Facebook “friends”. The risks can be high as detailed in an interview with Marc Freedman a prominent business person and very “net savvy” person thathad his Facebook account hacked and found himself at the center of a devious financial scam. Listen to the interview on Stan Relihan’s Connection Show.

LinkedIn remains, IMHO the leader in professional (as distinct from social) online networking. Their recent improvements to LinkedIn Groups and other features is making it easier to connect and communicate in a business acceptable online environment. Visit our LinkedIn Group – Trailing Spouse Network on LinkedIn

Sean raised the issue of Business Cards and likes the site Moo cards – www.moo.com. I’ve had good experience with VistaPrint.com particularly their free cards service.

We’ll be back again next week talking about what’s happening in some expat forums at the moment…. what are expats talking about?

Feel free to join us on the call, visit Talk shoe.com for call details and instructions, find us using show ID 28439 or search for Trailing Spouse. You can also find us in the iTunes store by searching Trailing Spouse.

Music on todays show was from Jamendo.com. The song is Feel the Force by Grant Siedle.

– Jeff