Happened to be browsing Feedburner today and found an interesting post in their blog about a new API. The Feed Awareness API looks very interesting and seems to already have support from some of the feed reader software. The best way to describe it is to quote the Feedburner site.
Feed Awareness describes the extent and frequency with which a publisher’s feed and its content items are consumed, clicked on, and referred to by independent sources (i.e., “syndicated”).
Is it similar to Attention.xml, yes, is it the same no. While the Feed Awareness API tells you how many people have “consumed” the feed, how many people have clicked on each post and how many times it has been referred to it does not cover some of the other pieces of Attention.XML, such as:-
- Date last updated
- Social relationships of the author
- Reading information such as last read time and time to read
Both technologies can help with building the reputation and authority of a specific site/digital identity. This reputation could then be used as an input into the background checking process of a candidate, I know this is a stretch but bear with me. Recruiters are already using search engines to check up on candidates so why not build that into the ATS system? The social reputation provided by your digital identity is a great foundation.
Michael Specht 
Sure, Googling someone is good for broad strokes of a person’s background. But then, too, there’s the case where you may have really good people who simply aren’t linked to – maybe they’re not accepted by a clique of the blogosphere. Or maybe they don’t accept a clique of the blogosphere.
Or maybe they just don’t care. Indeed, many webloggers don’t really care, but you don’t hear too much about them because they aren’t in the clique.
So I don’t know if this tool makes things more elitist for cliques or not. What I do know is that the *archives* of a weblog tell you about a person more consistently; what they talk about and how they talk about it. The ‘buzz’ in the blogosphere is largely made up, especially with people simply posting a link to what someone else thinks.
Taran sorry I think I might have mislead you I am not talking just about blogs more a permanent kind of digital identity or ePortfolio-like environment. I am trying to prepare a graphical representation of my thoughts to make them easier to understand.
Once we start having a more permanent representation online (which I believe will happen) it is not so strange that ATS’s might use a search engine to find candidates. Of course wthere will always be the hard to find candidate.
OK, now that you answered that in the way you did I think I see what you’re trying to do. But isn’t there still a danger of ‘within-the-bubble’? It seems you’re talking about a concept similar to osmosis, but the concentration is something you want so you can dose it for a price. 🙂 Good business.
Very interesting, I shall try to follow this.
Yes there is a risk but no more of a risk than what happened with organisations “strongly prefering” soft-copy only resumes or advertising non-technical jobs on job boards. I can remember in the mid 90’s going through many discussions with HR professionals where they we certain that these things would not catch on. 10 years on look where we are.
I hope to have some pictures available soon that develop these ideas further.