Networking Sites for Visual Creative Professionals
Some networking sites designed with the creative professional in mind are Behance, Carbonmade, and FigDig. If you’re an illustrator, photographer, or some other type of creative professional, join at least one that shows your talents in the way you want them seen.
Behance, a networking site for visual creative professionals
Behance is rapidly becoming the most powerful authority for creative professionals online. (Even global organizations, such as AIGA, Adobe, and MTV, have used Behance’s technology to create portfolios for their work.)
Much more than a portfolio generation website, Behance offers project management software, industry-specific job boards, award-winning blogs with advice for creative professionals, and a LinkedIn plug-in.
The Behance network of sites has four main categories:
The Behance Network: This site is the portfolio creation platform. Besides allowing users to set up an online gallery of their work, this network also hosts job postings, runs creative competitions, serves recruiters, and allows networking opportunities through interest groups. (And thanks to a new partnership with LinkedIn, you can now display your Behance portfolio directly inside your LinkedIn profile.)
Served Sites: As content uploads into the Behance Network, it streams into industry-specific sites called Served sites.
The 99Percent: This site is the brainchild of Behance’s CEO, Scott Belsky, and is the name of a blog, creative consulting service, and annual conference. The website contains great articles and resources for creative professionals of all kinds. Topics include playlists to listen to for better creativity, productivity tips, and video lectures from leading creative professionals around the world.
The Action Method: Behance used its unique position of having access to thousands of top creative professionals worldwide to figure out what makes successful creatives productive. Through this research, Behance devised what it calls the Action Method, which is a project management philosophy that claims to make ideas happen. The Action Method includes an online tool, iPhone app, and paper planners.
Carbonmade, a networking site for visual creative professionals
Creative professionals often struggle with finding ways of demonstrating their past work online. After all, you can’t e-mail a physical portfolio or stumble across one through an Internet search. Setting up a website can take many hours of tinkering, and a lot of online portfolio sites charge monthly subscriptions.
Carbonmade, on the other hand, is a free, easy-to-use portfolio builder that supports Google indexing and public facing profiles, which means there’s a greater chance of someone finding your portfolio during a Google search of your name.
Your Carbonmade account gives you two main pages, one displaying your work and another with information about you. (Click the Examples button at the top of the home page and then select a sample portfolio.) The more content you include, the better your chances are of appearing on someone’s list of search results.
Although Carbonmade isn’t a community site, you can browse other people’s creative portfolios; generally speaking, if they’ve included their contact info, they want people to contact them. Find other creative professionals on Carbonmade by entering your industry or keywords with the following code in a fresh Google search:
Site: carbonmade.com "[your keyword]"
Carbonmade’s free version only has a few designs and limits the number of pieces you can upload, so you have to be a bit picky about which items you display. Be sure to link to your portfolio from LinkedIn.
FigDig, a networking site for visual creative professionals
FigDig is an online portfolio tool that allows you to upload images and PDFs to display in high-definition. It also has a job-posting section worth taking a look at. Although membership is free, FigDig displays ads to subsidize its revenue, which can make the site look a bit cluttered.
One distinction FigDig has from other online creative networking sites is that people can rate and leave comments on portfolios. Having this type of peer review may help you foster more engagement with your work and motivate you to post your best work. To see other professional portfolios on FigDig, just use its keyword search tool and type in related keywords.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
archive
1. (noun) A list of previous blog posts, in chronological order. 2. (verb) To place files or blog posts in a safer place (on DVD or another server) for longer-term or backup storage.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
attribute
Used in an HTML tag to give an instruction to a Web browser. For example, in This link goes to <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>, the <a> tag gets an attribute (href) and a value ("http://www.google.com") to go along with the basic tag. In this case, the attribute indicates to the browser that what comes next is a hypertext reference — in this case, a Web page.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
blacklist
An often-centralized list of e-mail addresses, URLs, and IP addresses used by spammers that are then forbidden in any blog post on your blog. With an up-to-date blacklist, a lot of spam is stopped before it becomes a comment.

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block
To stop all contact with a MySpace user. He can’t comment on your blog page or send you any message that you actually receive.

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blog
A combination of the words Web and log. Bloggers (individuals, groups, or businesses) post a chronological log of information. Content is determined entirely by the author(s) of the blog; many are personal journals.

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blog post
An entry in a blog, possibly containing text, images, and other media.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
blogger
The author of a blog.

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blogging policy
Outlines what you’re allowed to post in your blog.

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blogging software
Technology that enables you to blog. Can be either hosted or nonhosted.

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blogroll
A collection of links used or recommended by a blogger.

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cookie
A short piece of computer code, stored on your computer, that enables Web sites to remember certain settings and information the next time you visit that site.

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Dashboard
A kind of control panel in Blogger that shows you the blogs you’ve set up, giving you access posting, using help resources, or even creating another blog.

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definition list
A type of HTML list that gives a term and then its definition and has built-in spacing to lay out those elements properly.

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disk space
Amount of room available on your hard drive.

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domain
A domain is the address, or main URL, that people type in the browser to get to your Web site. The domain name you choose can’t be used by anyone else.

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domain registrar
A service that enables you to register a domain name.

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entry
An single posting in a blog containing text, images, or other media, or any combination of those things.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
Facebook
A social-networking service that enables you to keep in contact with families and friends via the Web.

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Flickr
A Web site that allows you to share, organize, edit, and otherwise manage your photos.

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Friend List
Your virtual online address book in MySpace. You can become someone’s friend by either sending a fellow MySpacer a Friend Request or by being on the receiving end of a Friend Request from another MySpace user.

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hosted services
Manages the data, software, and Web hosting of a blog; the blogger just manages the content.

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HTML
The computer coding used by Web designers to create Web pages.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
hyperlink
A navigation tool that allows a user to go from one Web location to another by clicking. Hyperinks (or just links) are typically underlined.

Blogging & Social Networking Glossary
hypertext reference
In HTML, the address that a hyperlink connects to when clicked. For example, in This link goes to <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>, the hypertext reference (href) is http://www.google.com. Hyperlink references can also jump to new positions on the same page, open a new e-mail message, or begin a file download.

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link
Short for hyperlink, a navigation tool that allows a user to go from one Web location to another by clicking. Links are typically underlined.

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Mom test
A self-test that flags inappropriate blog posts. If you’d let your mom read the post, then it’s probably passed the Mom test. Specifically, don’t blog about topics you think will hurt others; don’t blog about others without their permission, even about topics you consider inconsequential; and don’t identify friends and lovers by name without their permission.

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MySpace
A social-networking service that enables you to keep in contact with families and friends via the Web.

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MySpace profile
Your MySpace identity. It can contain as much or as little information about you as you’d like.

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news aggregation
The ability to aggregate news by using RSS feeds. Having a news aggregator included with your blog package allows your site to pull in information from another blog.

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nonhosted service
Blog software that you set up on your own Web server. It allows you to take on all responsibilities related to maintaining your blog.

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ordered list
Contains items that must be listed in a particular order, such as a list of ranks or preferences. It may also indicate a list of steps for the reader to follow.

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pinging
An automated notification system for search engines and newsreaders, letting those services know that your blog has been updated. A ping occurs when one computer asks another whether it’s there; the second computer confirms its presence.

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post
1. (noun) An entry in a blog containing text, images, other media, or any combination of these. 2. (verb) The act of creating and/or uploading a blog entry.

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private profile
A MySpace profile that’s limited on who can view it, such as only people on your Friend List.

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public domain
The status of publications, processes, and product designs that are free from copyrights and/or patents and are available for anyone's use.

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social network
A service, such as Facebook or MySpace, that enables to keep in touch with people you know — and meet people you don’t know.

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spam
Unsolicited electronic messages sent in bulk that may be commercial, nonsensical, or malicious. In addition to e-mail spam, blog comments and blog forums can be targeted by spammers.

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tag
A relevant keyword associated or assigned to a piece of information, such as an image, a blog entry, or a video clip. Tags are usually chosen informally by the content creator or by the online community; they help give content to nontext media and organize information for ease of searching.

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Trackback
A technology that tracks references to a blog posting that occurs on other blogs. They allow bloggers to link to blog posts on related topics.

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transparent
1. Being honest and truthful on your blog. Also means that you admit mistakes and engage in dialogue with readers who leave comments. Considered proper blogging etiquette. 2. Integration of applications, programs, and media from different sources in such a way that the end user is unaware that the content is not self-contained.

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unordered list
unordered list is a series of bulleted items and is used for lists that don’t require numbering.

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video blog
A blog consisting of video files, or the practice of placing a video file in a blog post.

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video-sharing service
A service, such as YouTube, that enables you to share video with others.

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Web host
The Web server where you software, graphics, and other files live online.

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Web server
Technology that looks at what Web page is requested and then feeds the browser the appropriate file. It does most of the hard work of serving Web pages to visitors coming to your Web site.

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whitelist
A list of preselected users who are allowed to comment on your blog.

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YouTube
A video-sharing service.