HR Bloggers

I have been exchanging a couple of emails with Mark Willaman from HRMarketer.com on the different sources we read. During this exchange I was struck by the lack of prominant HR thinkers who blog, and those that do publish online seem to only have email subscription services.

For example the famous Dr John only has an email subscription model for his free articles and no blog. I have heard Dr John speak several times and always had the impression that he was on the leading edge, so this surprises me. Now for all I know is he has looked at these tecnologies and decided that they are not for him.

I agree with Mark, Dr John would make an excellent blogger. The Electronic Recruiting Exchange also only has an email model, no RSS, and the prominent HR mags none (which I have found), which is sad as I want to consolidate everything into my newsreader. I suspect the reasons are very similar to why IDG is currently no offering RSS. Listening to Mark Jones On the Pod with Mick & Cam (G’Day World), Mark provided an interesting perspective for me on the publishers point of view and how the advertising makes up such an important portion of their business (it is their business) and that there is no defacto method of measuring the “value” of an RSS reader.

HR people I would like to see blog. Dr John Sullivan, Row Henson, Karen Beaman, Bob Stambaugh, John Macy and many others. I have tried to find blogs for them but failed, if anyone knows of them please let me know.

The moving process

We are right into moving at the moment, official date of move 7th Feb, less than one month.

This weekend we fly to Melbourne for the weekend to find somewhere to live. Spent the last couple of weeks reviewing domain.com.au and realestate.com.au and have narrowed things to about 15 places in south east Melbourne. The weekend after we prepare for a garage sale, then 29th is the garage sale and 30th I move (hopefully into our new house that is found this weekend 🙂 ). Then back on the 5th for my sister-in-law’s wedding on the 6th, where Jayne is in the wedding party. Then 8am on the 7th the truck arrives, we then drive down on the 8th, and hopefully our things arrive on the 9th or 10th, it will be camping on the floor until then.

Once we have the house under control we can track down a school.

The boxes arrived from the removalist’s and so now it is down to packing, not too bad as we have done this 3 times in the last 6 years.

Google having trouble recruiting?

From John Battelle’s Searchblog I found an interesting post over at the Google Blog. What I found most interesting were the comments on John’s blog where readers seem to feel that Google might be the cause of their own issues.

Over the last month or so there has been discussion in the last few weeks over the interview process (and the assocaited testing) on a number of different recruiting sites, including Johanna Rothman, a couple from the “Moon Gals”, and Recruiting.com.

10 Ways to use blogs internally

Jenny over at The Shifted Library posted and snippet from Cutting Through on 10 ways to use blogs in for managing projects. A good post covering many great areas of potential usage.

A couple of the items might be better suited for a Wiki, for example Issues Logs, or Capturing Requirements, but using a blog is a start. Further to this Tim at Cutting Through posted on 4 ways to use Wikis in project management, with some very good ideas.

What we really need to a tool that includes both types of functions as a framework for project management. I might look to see if Plone does this.

PeopleSoft oh sorry Oracle

Well it looks like the courting process of PeopleSoft by Oracle is now over. After an 18 month chase the reluctant PeopleSoft has now been acquired by Oracle. Jan 14 is now the date when employees will find out who no longer has a job with the newly merged organisation, while the 18th is when customers find out what it means to them.

It is sad to see PeopleSoft go, they were the organisation who defined the modern day HRIS product. The forward thinkers such as Row Henson and others from within PeopleSoft, have had a profound impact on our industry, I can only hope that Oracle still provides an environment for these people to operate.

On the positive side of things the newly combined organisation has the potential to make a real and long lasting impact on the HRIS industry.

More on ePortfolios

A few weeks ago I mentioned ePortfolios and since then I have been thinking through the different items that would make up such a tool. An ePortfolio allows a learner to to develop a portfolio of work/artifacts that show their learning, skills, accomplishments and development. Blogs provide a framework publish these items and when the blog is outside a corporate environment can move with the writer. The draw back of blogs is there is no easy method for others to “certify” the work, once the learner has completed a learning session. The certification allows others to see that the artifact has a reputation that can be trusted. However trackback and comments allow an ad-hoc peer review process but this is not “complete” enough to certify the learner has actually achieved to the stated objectives.

Harold Jarche talks about some of the different components that might form the framework for an ePortfolio system, however he does not mention ePortfolios. He mentioned a tool called Ping that seems to be developing in the right direction.

Some of the tools being developed by Technorati might be augmented to assist, however new ones would be required to fully enable an ePortfolio. Maybe the vote extension could be enhanced to provide a framework for others to certify the qualify of the work. The XFN framework could help develop peer networks during the course of a learning activity.

I have been looking at Plone as a possible tool to use as the framework for a ePortfolio (thanks to George Siemens from eLearnSpace for pointing me in the right direction). The tools seems very similar to MovableType, I hope to get some time soon to install it and see where it takes me.