Jame Healy invited me over to Sunaptic this morning to give a little talk about personal brand development (and Web 2.0). Sort of not necessarily in that order.

The funny thing, of course, is that, Kris and Jame are highly ranked for the search phrase "personal brand development". Jame feels quite strongly about this, and could have probably given a better presentation than I did...I'm going to be looking for more posts from him on this topic, especially the role of companies in working with employees. Here's the presentation: Web 2.0 and Personal Brand Development (PDF) (might update this later to include the notes version)

My take on personal brand development? A respected, well-known employee is a credit to their employer, just as working for a high-profile company reflects well on the employee. Forward thinking companies should encourage and reward personal brand development. Interestingly enough, François Nonnenmacher had a great synthesis post about this very topic this morning, called Personal vs. Professional Identity.

For the Sunaptic folks that are interested in setting up their own space, here are links to some starting points:

• Buy a domain. I recommend NameCheap -- they don't try and sell you extra stuff, have a great control panel for managing DNS and email aliasing/forwarding (free), and in general have been hassle free for me. I use EasyDNS for Canadian .ca registrations, but EasyDNS is looking a little pricey these days.
• Get a hosted blogging service like Wordpress.com or Typepad. Bryght is overkill for a personal blog...unless you're a geek. It is great if you want to turn on company blogs for everyone, use built in aggregation features, manage other types of content like events, etc.
• Use Newsgator or Bloglines to start reading blogs, use Technorati and PubSub to subscribe to searches for your name, URL, and other things that interest you. Use del.icio.us or furl.net to grab links.
• Offline posting tools on Windows include Qumana, ecto, and w.bloggar.
• Start posting, make comments, get involved in the conversation, and build your personal brand. Voila! Instant pay raise :P