My Two Cents
I was referred to Twitter by my boss and was advised to follow several leading experts in our field (GIS) one of which is my boss. However, when I did so I got a lot "my dog is playing in the rain.", "My soup is cold." "I am sitting at the airport." When this requires maintaining an open internet connection on a military network without much bandwidth or capacity, (I had to enter this post twice because the attempted save truncated it to five words), I found I was not able to work efficiently because I spent too much time waiting for sites to be connected.
I never received any interesting posts from Linked in though I got a lot of notices that so and so was now linked in, as well as a lot of spam from people purporting to be linked. Our company will pay for training but the cost of one class will usually exceed the training budget for the entire year, and they won't pay for time so you have to use leave to attend.
So my best success has come from buying and reading books, (or how to get certified without paying microsoft). However, everyone knows that books are usually based on advance versions of the new release so that you have to go into the forums to find out where the books fall short. I also am member of a local User group which can be helpful. Also in researching a issue on line for work, I often find blogs that mention some other related issue which represents a technological advance or an tech area with which I have no experience. My boss stays up past midnight each night trying out new stuff and gets up at 4:30 each morning to get the kids off to school. I can't do that. I am in bed by 8:30 PM each evening exhausted and get up at 6:30 dreading another day. Saw another blog about programmers that essentially set their own hours like 11 AM to 2 PM then 4 PM to 8 PM, working from home, going into the office once a week. That would be the life. You would have 2 hours in the middle of each day to check out new technology, no commute, and by breaking the day in 4 hour segments you would still have the energy to check out new stuff when you get home.
