Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Going into 2012, I’m thinking that we are very responsible to consider what we publish and curate as media channels, should attention, platform-building, and better community relationships be our goal. In thinking about all your various uses of social networks, if you are working with the mindset that they are all tied together as a larger media property for yourself, it becomes important to think about what you’re putting through those channels. Attention is a currency, and if we spend too much of other people’s attention on frivolous posts and shares, we risk losing that attention.

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Small business and startup employees are constantly on the go. They need quick, mobile solutions for scanning, storing, organizing and sharing important documents.

Eager to empty that box full of receipts? Looking for an easy and secure way to send signed documents? We’ve found eight apps and tools that seamlessly scan and file your most important documents and keepsakes. Best of all, most of them integrate with proven file hosts Dropbox and Evernote.

What other tools have proved useful when scanning and integrating your own documents.

One of the most universal apps out there, DocScanner works across iOS, Android and Symbian platforms. Just take a photo of a document, receipt or notebook page and email it as a PDF. Integrate with Mobile.me, Dropbox or Evernote.

Price: $4.99

Similar to DocScanner, this iPhone only app scans and sends documents securely by email and integrates information into Evernote, Dropbox and Google Docs.

Price: $6.99

The iPhone app not only can create PDF documents with multiple scans, but also can digitize and improve handwritten notes.

Price: FREE

Use this app to scan business cards, then add them as contacts in your phone and connect with them on LinkedIn.

Price: FREE

CamScanner allows for post-scan image editing and enhancement. You’re also able to search the text within a PDF image. The app also has fax and AirPrint capabilities.

Price: $4.99

This web/mobile app is named for — you guessed it — all the scrap papers you leave in a shoebox, namely, receipts. Shoeboxed transforms scanned receipts or coupons into organized categories or even expense reports.

Price: FREE

SignNow allows you to securely send scanned documents online for signatures. Sign the documents from a web browser, smartphone or tablet. Great for closing a lease deal or sending freelance contracts.

Price: FREE

For anyone still inclined toward paper scanning, try the Doxie scanner, a super portable single document scanner that integrates with many desktop and mobile apps.

Price: $149

Jindrich Liska is founder and CEO of Jobmagic, a leading social recruiting platform which enables employers to hire candidates on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Jindrich has pioneered many social recruiting approaches which are now used worldwide by brands such as Disney, J.Crew and Compuware.

The 2011 job market is ending on a positive note. With unemployment shrinking to a mere 8.6% — its lowest level since May 2008 — and a steadily growing economy, businesses are planning on hiring and recruiting even more as their confidence in customer demand builds.

In this new, growing market, those seeking their next dream job should cultivate their presence and contacts strategically in places where employers will be on the lookout for the best talent. According to the MSU survey PDF of more than 3,000 companies conducted last month, social media has flourished as a burgeoning recruitment strategy, becoming a more mainstream approach for companies of all sizes and industries, even the most conservative. For job seekers, social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter have established new ways getting discovered by employers, as well as directly reaching recruiters and hiring managers.

Here’s the scoop on what job seekers should know in order to be successful in today’s digital job market.

Your Social Media Profiles Are as Important Your Resume (If Not More Important)

The MSU report asserts that 36% of companies surveyed are using social media for recruiting. In today’s competitive market, recruiters look for the most current information on candidates, which is readily and easily available on social networks. Job seekers should actively include links to their complete and up-to-date Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter profiles in their applications. When creating your profiles, do not just import your resume — it often contains too much detailed information. Rather, build your profile from scratch with a concise description of your prior experience to grab a recruiter’s attention. To make yourself more discoverable, search engine optimize your title and skills.

Be sure to use social news streams as a dynamic extension of your traditional resume. Employers are interested in candidates who are passionate about their work. Job hopefuls should share interesting and relevant news about your industries and areas of expertise, demonstrating their knowledge and establishing yourself as an essential player in the fields. While the social news dialogue ought to maintain a professional tone, you should also reveal yourself to be a fun, authentic individual.

80% of Success is Showing up

Social media enables us to stand out, to be more noticeable, to differentiate ourselves from the masses and to tell the whole story behind and beyond a one-page resume. When contributing to your news streams and profiles, choose current topics of interest, start participating in discussions about your professional field and industry trends, and share your own hands-on tricks of the trade. Many companies are now making use of Facebook Pages that are dedicated exclusively to careers and hiring. These pages are generally run by recruiters and talent acquisition professionals that are looking to attract and hire candidates. Savvy job seekers should make use of these pages and proactively ask questions about job openings, the specifics of a company’s interview process, or any upcoming career events. Responses are generally instantaneous, and you will quickly establish connections within the company.

Additionally, every field has its own industry thought leaders broadcasting on Twitter. You should follow the influencers in your field, contribute to the discussion and share it with others who might be interested. Take advantage of @-mention feature to keep participants engaged and include hashtags to increase the visibility of your tweets.

You should also join LinkedIn Groups related to your field or moderated by a company you are interested in. Since hiring managers are always on the lookout for team players, you should establish a reputation by sharing your opinion, answering questions and offering advice in the group discussion forums. Join specific company groups to gain additional insight and keep up on the latest hiring news. Recruiters are very active in these groups, and taking steps to establish a positive LinkedIn presence will help to assure that you get a call.

Social Networks Enable Direct Interaction

There was a time when contacting recruiters on job sites and boards was difficult, and proactively reaching out to hiring managers was nearly impossible. Social media has created a culture of openness, and has all but eliminated the ‘black hole’ that resumes have fallen into for decades. Many companies even highlight their recruiters on job postings; not only can you contact a recruiter directly, but you can often view recruiters’ and hiring managers’ social media profiles before contacting them.

Job seekers need to connect to recruiters who are hiring in their field and location. If you don’t know them directly, subscribe to them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter to stay current on all job openings, and work towards developing a positive relationship with them.

Your Networks Help You Find Jobs (and Help Employers Find You)

More companies than ever are cutting their job advertising budgets, opting to channel their recruiting efforts through referral hiring. The MSU report indicates that 44% of companies use referral hiring, and 49% tap into alumni networks in order to recruit. Companies are drawing on their employee’s social networks to share jobs and attract the most qualified candidates. The more extensive your personal network is, the greater your odds of encountering these unadvertised job opportunities.

Grow your networks by reaching out and connecting to people with whom you have either professional or personal relationships. If you don’t know the person well, begin by subscribing to their feed or ask a friend for an introduction. As in real life, opportunities can arise from any connection — a co-worker, a friend, a neighbor, etc. Many companies publish their job openings and career events on their Facebook Pages, so connect to the pages of companies that are of interest to you to start receiving active job openings in your news feed with little effort.

With the economy on the mend and hiring rates rising, job seekers should not hesitate to break into the social media sphere. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter offer an abundance of ways to connect with companies, foster your professional reputation, gain exposure to job postings, and ultimately, realize your professional aspirations. Establish your online professional brand and presence now. Your dream job is waiting for you.

Until the transcontinental railroad, there were no time zones. Each village kept its own time, based on its own steeple and its own high noon. And why not? There was no good reason to go through the pain of coordinating the clocks.

Factory work forced us all to know exactly what time it was. The shift couldn’t start until the foreman and the workers were ready to go. Synchronicity paid big dividends, so we embraced it.

This notion of lockstep started to inform all elements of our culture. Not just what time rush hour was (what a bizarre concept) but how old you should be to go to college and to get a job and to get married and to have kids and to retire.

The web is asynchronous. Time frames have accelerated (started/funded/built/sold!) at the same time they have slowed down. It’s up to you to decide how long your time horizon is–perhaps you’re willing to invest five years into building a solid reputation on a web platform. The decision to work at a different rate than others can be a significant competitive advantage.

Celebrate New Year’s when you want to, and as often as you choose. They’re your resolutions, not ours.

Every year since around 2006, I’ve been challenging people to forego the idea of a resolution, and instead, to come up with 3 words that will help you define your goals and experiences for the coming year. Resolutions are often too vague, or too directed towards one goal. It might be “quit smoking” or “lose 20 pounds” or “get hired.” These are all fine aspirations, but I challenge you to dig deeper, to find three words that could be used as lighthouses to guide you through stormy seas, that can be used as flags on the battlefield of your challenges, words that will bolster you and give you a direction that goes beyond the goals you might attach as a result of these words.

This year, I’ve got a little something more, thanks to Jacqueline’s post. Now, not only will I stick to my three words, but I will use Jacq’s idea of #12in12 to execute on the meaning of those three words every month. I invite you to do the same. It really seems like the best way to stay very mindful of your 3 words and their place in your life.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen raised a lot of eyebrows with his plan to build the largest airplane ever, then use it to launch rockets into space. But as wild as the idea of a six-engine airplane carrying a multi-stage rocket may be, it is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Air-launched rockets have been around for more than 60 years, and airplanes have been launching payloads into orbit since the 1990s. Even Burt Rutan, the legendary aerospace designer working with Allen on Stratolaunch Systems, has a history with the technique. He designed the wing for an air launched rocket back in the 1980s as well as SpaceShipOne and its mother ship White Knight winning the X-Prize in 2004.

The only difference is the scale. Stratolaunch is taking air launches to a whole new level.

Allen and Rutan have proposed building an aircraft that features six Boeing 747 engines and a wingspan of 385 feet — more than 120 feet wider than an Airbus A380, currently the largest commercial passenger plane in service. It’s nearly 100 feet more wingspan than the Antonov An-225, the world’s largest airplane. The airplane will have a gross weight of 1.2 million pounds, including a 490,000-pound booster rocket being developed by SpaceX. The mothership will fly to an altitude of about 30,000 feet, then release the rocket. The aircraft will be designed and built by Scaled Composites.

Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, joins super-wealthy entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos in looking to the heavens for his next venture, as NASA turns to the private sector for help getting to space.

Stratolaunch is easily among the most ambitious proposals. But the idea behind it dates to the early days of aviation, when airships launched biplane fighters toward the end of World War I.

Then, as now, the idea was to maximize range, or payload, while minimizing the amount of fuel needed for a mission. In the earliest days of aviation, airplanes simply could not carry enough fuel for long flights in battle. These days, it’s about needing less fuel and optimizing a design for delivering a payload to orbit.

One of the biggest challenges to putting things into low earth orbit is the amount of energy required to get there. The International Space Station orbits around 200 to 250 miles above the earth. Like the small biplanes of the early 20th century, a space vehicle would need less fuel for its mission if it could be carried even a small percentage of the way to orbit by the relatively more efficient aircraft. Expendable rockets require enormous amounts of fuel in order to put a relatively small payload into low earth orbit — the payload may be as little as 1 to 3.5 percent of the vehicle’s launch weight.

Carrying a rocket to high altitude means it needs less fuel, thereby saving weight and money. Much of the fuel needed to launch a rocket is needed just to get above the dense lower levels of the atmosphere. At 30,000 feet more than half of the density of the atmosphere would be below the rocket. Beyond saving fuel, air-launching a rocket allows engineers to design more efficient rocket nozzles because they’re operating in the thinner parts of the atmosphere.

There also is a slight reduction in gravitational force at higher altitudes, and some of the velocity needed to achieve orbit is provided by the launch vehicle’s forward motion.

Granted, many of the benefits offered by air-launched vehicles are small, but they add up. As a result, getting into orbit is a little easier, and cheaper when you make an airplane the first stage of a multi-stage system to deliver payloads into orbit.

Another big advantage of using an airplane as a launch platform is the ability to launch from almost anywhere. There is no need to build a specialized, and expensive, launch facility with launch pads and other equipment familiar to anyone who’s seen Cape Canaveral. This makes it easier to take advantage of weather or optimal launch sites, such as equatorial locations that can further reduce the energy needed to achieve orbit.

Here, too, Allen and Rutan are looking to the past in building Stratolaunch.

From the earliest days of rocket-powered aviation, the goals have been top speed and highest altitude. To avoid having to carry the extra fuel (aka, weight) needed to achieve the altitude needed for test flights at the dawn of the rocket age, experimental rocket aircraft were carried aloft by larger airplanes. On October 14, 1947 a rocket-powered airplane carried by a Boeing B-29 bomber made history when Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 beyond the speed of sound. Air-launched rockets allowed test pilots to inch their way toward space through the 1940s and 1950s.

By the late 1960s, NASA and the U.S. Air Force were collaborating on the X-15. The X-15 made multiple air-launched flights to sub-orbital space and pushed the boundaries of hypersonic flight. But when the X-15 program ended in 1969, so to did the idea of air-launched vehicles. The Saturn V and Soyuz rockets took over the duties of reaching space, joined later by the Space Shuttle.

During the 1980s, Dr. Antonio Elias began working on a new air launched space vehicle that could use an airliner as its launch platform. The Pegasus rocket was tested in 1990 by the same NASA Boeing B-52, “Balls 8,” that carried the X-15. Pegasus, featuring a delta wing designed by Rutan, could deliver a relatively small payload of about 1,000 pounds to low earth orbit. Once testing was finished, Orbital Sciences used a former Air Canada Lockheed L-1011 to carry Pegasus to altitude and launch it into orbit.

Orbital Sciences’ Lockheed L-1011 drops the Pegasus rocket on an orbital mission.

The L-1011 has flown 33 missions with the Pegasus rockets (the first seven were flown with the B-52). After a few launch failures early on, the system has a perfect record since 1996. It has delivered more than 80 satellites to orbit.

Even now, Allen isn’t alone in pursuing the idea.

DARPA is investigating the possibility of using an off-the-shelf airplane to deliver small payloads to orbit. The idea is to make it far cheaper to put a 100 pound payload in space using something as small as a business jet or fighter jet as the launch platform.

There have been several other ideas over the years, including Boeing’s Air Launch which was to use a 747 as the carrier aircraft. A British concept called Interim HOTOL would use Antonov An-225, currently the world’s largest aircraft, as the carrier aircraft by adding two more engines for a total of eight. There even have been studies looking into the possibility of towing a spacecraft like a glider or even carrying a rocket in the cargo hold of an airplane and pushing it out the back.

But Virgin Galactic may have the most high-profile air-launch. The Scaled Composites follow on to Rutan’s SpaceShipOne is SpaceShipTwo, a sub-orbital spacecraft similar in concept to the X-15.

This time around, Scaled Composites and Rutan are thinking even bigger. In classic Rutan style, Stratolaunch will use engines, landing gear, cockpit items and other parts from a pair of used Boeing 747s it has purchased in order to reduce development costs.

Designed by engineers at Scaled Composites, the massive Stratolaunch carrier aircraft will have a range of 1,300 miles. This will give it some flexibility in being able to take off from different airports around the world and flying to a safe location for launch. That said, the fact it will need a 12,000-foot runway will limit the number of airports able to accommodate the giant.

The booster rocket is based on the Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX. Once released at approximately 30,000 feet, the rocket will use a two stage booster to deliver a payload of up to 13,500 pounds to low earth orbit.

First flights for the Stratolaunch system are scheduled for 2016.

Images: Stratolaunch, NASA