Blog Auction over

Ok maybe I am a bit late but the auction is over and Jeremy has sold his services for $3350, not bad at all. Congratulations! The purchaser was Inkspress, good luck to them! If Jeremy does only 5 posts over the 13 week period it will cost them about $50/post, now hopefully they take many of the other services that Jeremy can offer and develop a blogging culture and have an internal resource continue what he starts.

On a side note Jeremy and Darren (the other blogger on eBay) have had so much business flow their way in the past 10 days they have now formed a blog consulting company, InsideBlogging, wow! A whole new industry.

As I mentioned earlier in the week I had a chat to BlogshpereRadio about the auctions, here is the special report. Mack chatted to Jeremy and Darren along with myself and two other bloggers Wayne Hurlbet and Mick Stanic and has put together a special report on the last 10 days and the impact on blogging going forward. Some of you might know Mick from G’Day World with Cameron Reilly, if you have not listened, certainly worth it.

Managers misuse techonlogy

InfoWorld has an interesting piece which just goes to show the world is changing. Such studies will be useful for organisations looking to rollout collaborative and groupware tools. For example, what are the real implications of instant messaging or VOIP? How should the change program be managed, what should it cover and how can we help our employees come to terms with the new environment?

All very important questions that should be addressed BEFORE such technology is deployed. This also goes to show that NO technology project that impacts employees should be undertaken without change management of some sort.

Do you have sex in the office?

Ok, I know the title probably got you attention, but it does happen.

How do I know this? Well BP in the UK have recently sent a memo to all managers requesting people to stop having sex in the office.

How did they know? Well it was caught on the CCTV cameras by the security guards! Don’t believe me have a read of this little item from Human Resources Magazine in Australia.

Interest implications, can the security guards claim sexual harassment? What happens if the security guards miss a real security event while watching the show? Could the CCTV footage be used in a sexual harassment suit? The mind boggles!

Microsoft to offer blogging service

For many this might be old news, but Microsoft has launched a blogging service called MSN Spaces.

I just created a replica of my blogger account over there to have a look (I will probably delete it in a few days so as not to confuse things). They have created very interesting tool integrating blogs, pictures, lists and music. This seems to be very consumer focused, maybe in 12 months blogs will be ubiquitous?

They seem to have most of the common features covered out of the box (some Blogger is missing and would do well to address, quickly) such as trackbacks, categories, comments and RSS feeds etc.

The integration with other MS tools and services is good, although it could be better. For example being able to load up to do lists from Outlook, but I am just picky.

The service would work very well inside an organisation for team collaboration, maybe a couple of changes. An example, maybe instead of music lists of documents etc would be good.

Searching for jobs and resumes

I wrote earlier this week about Heather’s post on .jobs.

There have been a couple of comments about searchability etc on jobs and resumes. I find it interesting that when I search on Google, Yahoo or MSN search I cannot find 90% of jobs, even ones from corporate sites!

Let’s take this job @ Microsoft. If I search for it in MSN Search by Job Title I get nothing, I tried position number, and several other methods. Now I know why this is the case, because the job is generated from a database dynamically why the query is executed but the user.

But WHY! Of course Microsoft want someone to find the job, they want someone to even fill the job. So why doesn’t the job appear?

Now I did the a few other searches and this job from Blogger Jobs I found in several places, including Monster which surprised me.

My point is the whole .jobs thing might disappear if it was EASY for job seekers to find a job. This was the basis of my earlier post.

Now just maybe some of the smart folks at Google, Yahoo, MSN etc might be the ones to help resolve the issue. Or maybe this is an opportunity for an enterprising company to step in, however I would see it easier for the average punter if the majors helped out.

Are blogs ubiquitous?

I have been reading some of the notes from BlogTalk 2.0 and came across some notes on Ben & Mena Trott’s keynote. (You know Ben & Mena right? Six Apart, Moveable Type, and TypePad).

Anyway with all the talk today about it being “The Year of the Blog“. I came across an interesting comment in the notes:-

“When weblogs become invisible, the ‘weblogging revolution’ will have occurred.”

I have no idea who said it, I suspect either Ben or Mena but who knows. However it struck a cord. This is the key and so far I do not think we have got there.

When blogs are invisible organisations will be managing their internal knowledge, driving external PR and extending their relationships with their customers. Until then I guess it could all be a “storm in a tea cup”, but WE know that is not really true, don’t we. 😉

ePortfolios?

Just found an interesting site ePortfolios Portal which seems to have everything anyone would want to know about ePortfolios.

I had not heard of an ePortfolio until today and the brief reading I have done I feel they are almost like blogs with a bit extra. I am sure a MovableType expert could hack one of these together over the course of a few days. Now with a common XML format the product could easily talk with the course management and student information systems that are out there.

A new elearning site

I just found a new eLearning site elearnspace (via a colleague at Roche) in which has an interesting blog full of links and other commentary. Such as 10 technologies that are going to change the way we learn.

Every time I find a great nugget like this I wonder how did I miss such a good resource, and what’s wrong with me why didn’t I know about this sooner.

I guess tonight I am going to spend many hours learning what I don’t know. I expect there will be several posts in the next week on all this new content.