Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented at the front page.

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Continuing on from my recent remarks about the deterioration of LinkedIn, and my earlier thoughts on personal CRM as a non-LinkedIn, I’ve requested a download of my LinkedIn data. I wanted to take a look at what is included in it.

As I remembered from an earlier download the provided contact list contains the name, current role and date of connecting, but no links to the corresponding profiles. That renders the list of names more or less useless, if you would actually want to take your data and move on. However, going to the overview of my network on the LinkedIn site I can get my entire network shown in a single list. This overview used to be paginated, but now the network page is an endless scroll. It takes a bit of scrolling to go to the bottom of the list of a few thousand connections but then I had all my connections shown on a single page. Having saved that html file I can now strip out the links to profiles and add them to the list of connections in the data download. How I can make all that downloaded material useful as input for a personal CRM system is still an open but interesting question.

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It’s odd to see how conspiracy fantasies, suspect sources, disinformation and deliberate emotionally provocative or even antagonistic wording are on the rise on my LinkedIn timeline.

I first encountered a QAnon account in a comments section last August, but that person was still many steps away in my network. Now I see things popping up from direct connections and their connections. I had assumed that LinkedIn being tied to your professional reputation would go a long way to prevent such things, but apparently not any longer. In some instances, it’s almost as if people don’t realise they’re doing it, a boiling-a-frog effect of sorts.

One person being called out for some under-informed reactionary content by pointing out that their employer has the capabilities and resources to prove them wrong even responded “leave my employer out of it”. That’s not really possible though, as your employer is in your by-line and accompanies your avatar with every post and comment you make. Seven months after first encountering something like that on my LinkedIn timeline it is now a daily part of my timeline, and all coming from my Dutch network and their connections.

LinkedIn is starting to feel as icky as Facebook did three years ago. Makes me wonder how long LinkedIn will remain a viable tool. I don’t think I will be spending much or any attention on my timeline moving forward, until the moment LinkedIn is as much a failed social platform as others and it’s time to let go of it completely. That doesn’t mean disengaging with the people in my network obviously, but it is not at all my responsibility to help LinkedIn reach a certain level of quality of discourse by trying to counteract the muck. I was an early user of LinkedIn (nr. 8730, look at the source of your profile page and search it for ‘member:’ to find your number) in the spring of 2003, I know there’s already a trickle of people leaving the platform, and I wonder when (not if) I’ll fully join them.

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I came across the Dataview plugin for Obsidian as it was mentioned in the Discord chat group, and then looked at the forum discussion about the same.

This is a plugin that provides a query language which allows me to do a few things I had on my wishlist. For instance using the Day log note to also show notes created on that day. Dataviews works by using the ability of Obsidian to insert code into a note.

I added the following at the end of my Day log note for today:

``` dataview
TABLE file.ctime as Created, file.size, file.path as Path
FROM ""
WHERE date(2021-03-15T23:59:59) - file.ctime <= dur(1 days) SORT file.ctime desc ```

Which results in a list of files created on March 15th.

I added this to the Alfred snippet I use as a template for my Day logs, so that it will have the right date. I use fixed dates because then it will always be a record of notes created that day, also when I look back to a day log in a month or week etc.

[UPDATE 2021/03/20] In a conversation on the Dutch Obsidian Discord channel, Frank notes that my query above als retrieves any notes created after the date in question, because then the evaluated value becomes negative, which is also smaller than 1 days. I hadn't noticed as I hadn't looked back yet to an earlier day note. So it needs, as Maarten suggested, an additional statement to exclude those negative values, along the lines of and date(2021-03-15T23:59:59) - file.ctime >= dur(0 days)

Are you a Dutch speaking or Netherlands based Obsidian user? Would it be fun/interesting to have an on-line meet-up and compare notes (:D) on how you use Obsidian and for which purposes?
Ben jij een nederlandstalige of in Nederland wonende Obsidian gebruiker? Zou het leuk/interessant zijn om een online sessie te houden om onderling te vergelijken hoe we Obsidian gebruiken en voor welke doelen?