Last month, in response to the deepening recession, one contributor wrote “How To Network Like A Man.” It’s a great essay on networking, oriented around the story of a man losing his job and immediately putting to work his network of professional relationships to find new work. The advice in the essay isn’t gender-specific, and applies pretty broadly to almost anyone in a professional context — for web workers, good networking skills are even more valuable than understanding CSS or Photoshop inside out.

Here are some of the key points to take away from the piece:

1. Develop a networker’s mentality — being communicative, reciprocal and thinking of yourself as a”business owner” can help place you in the correct frame of mind for networking effectively.
2. Know Your Networking Tools – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and blogging are all name-checked as being part of the portfolio of digital tools necessary to actively network and maintain a significant public profile. (MySpace looks a little out of place there to me.) The article also provides a few tips on business cards, resumes, phone etiquette and the age-old handshake.
3. Look like a professional — the writer notes that appropriate professionalism with headshots, email signatures and documents can all help to brand yourself appropriately, and goes on to suggest a few dress codes for different personas and even times of day.

Some of the best networking advice I’ve read recently comes from Guy Kawasaki in a post called “The Art of Schmoozing.” He suggests that the essence of networking is “establishing relationships before you need them” and “discovering what you can do for someone else.” Kawasaki’s advice is really about altruism and generosity of time.

Share your networking tips in the comments.

Here is the first of a series of short interviews with a variety of web working types, starting with venture capitalist and co-founder of Alltop, Guy Kawasaki, who reveals his favorite web app: the “ultimate marketing tool for Twitter.”

What’s Your Favorite App, Guy Kawasaki? from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

You can find Guy Kawasaki on Twitter: @guykawasaki. Stay tuned for links to upcoming video sound bites from SXSW by following us at @webworkerdaily.

Alltop’s the unannounced creation of Guy Kawasaki and his two partners at Nononina. (Yes – that Guy Kawasaki). The beauty of Alltop is by providing the latest of the best on say politics (or 20 other topics presently), you can get a sense of what’s really happening in that world, quick. Alltop refreshes every 10 minutes or so, so are really seeing what’s happening now.

Hover over a headline and you get the extract from that item – click it and you’re into the item itself.

I caught up with Guy via email to ask him for Web Workers, what’s the biggest advantage to Alltop over reading all the same sources in Google Reader? “The biggest advantage is that we’re pre-loaded the topics with the most important feeds. Think of Alltop as an online magazine rack. You can go to the “social media” section of the rack and see the last five stories from approximately fifty publications,” he replied. “We don’t compete with Google Reader, MyYahoo, Netvibes, or Pageflakes. These products are for the top .1% of Internet users who know what a feed reader and RSS feeds are. Alltop is for ‘the rest of us.’”

“Not to be sexist, but here’s a good test. Let’s suppose that your wife really loves fashion. Would you rather tell her to go to fashion.alltop.com or go find Google Reader, install it, find the feeds of her favorite fashion sites, and put them in Google Reader? Or, suppose that your husband loves cars. Do you want to use Google Reader or point him to autos.alltop.com? Of course, this assumes that you love your wife or husband.” “If nothing else, we provide a very good starting point for power users to find the best sources for a topic. Then they can use the feeds that we found and put them in Google Reader, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc. Such is life–I’m willing to gamble when their less-technically-astute friend, relative, colleague asks about finding news for a topic, they’ll probably rather point them to an Alltop site than teach them the art of feed aggregation.”

Presently, Alltop is getting 5,000 to 10,000 visitors a day, plans to roll out another five topics in the next three weeks and hopes to make money via inline text ads, similar to what what Google does at the top of search results.

The only things I might like to see different is that unlike stories in Google News and iGoogle feeds you click and you’re in the story: with Alltop, you either have to log in or register for mainstream news sites such as the New York Times to get to the story. Nor does Alltop produce an RSS feed. “We’re not sure that an RSS feed makes sense,” Guy wrote back. “For a topic like politics.alltop.com, there are approximately sixty sources with five stories each updating every ten to twenty minutes. That’s a minimum of 300 stories in a feed. How useful do you think it is to drink out of sixty hoses at once?”

On second thought, maybe not having an RSS feed isn’t a bad idea at all.