Can one person make an impact?

Over the last year the train system across Sydney has been collapsing under mis-management and technical issues. Delays of 1 30 minutes are regular enough to cause major frustrations. Sometime it can take be 2 hrs to complete a journey that should only take about 45 minutes.

Eventually Rebecca Tuner a legal secretary had had enough and call ed on the public to take action, not to pay for tickets today. Rebecca called on all commuters to join her in an action of civil disobedience. More background on why she has done this here.

Initially the government said they would fine anyone who did not have a ticket, the current fine is $200. The government eventually had to back down when massive media and public support swelled for Rebecca’s idea. This was topped off by 20,000 unionists pledged their support. Even RailCorp workers got behind her campaign by handing out leaflets blaming management for the poor train service.

Eventually the government backed down and tried to out do Rebecca and announced that today would be a “government approved” fare free day! Now it seems that the Premier himself is taking the blame.

Once again it seems a single person can make a difference.

Firefox Advocator

It is interesting to see the wave of public support for Firefox. I have been watching news articles pouring out all over the globe about Firefox and I personally now use if for most day to day browsing, although some sites do not support Firefox just yet.

Chris Holland has a new term Firefox Advocator, I just check so far the term is only appearing on Chris’s blog (or his referenced) when search in Google, Yahoo and MSN, this is as of 9:30am ADEST Sunday 21 Nov. I wonder if the term will take off?

Keep It Simple Stupid or KISS!

I wrote about Google’s current billboard advertising last month. This week I noticed something very interesting outside our local Holden (GM for those in the US) dealership. They are advertising for new technicans via a sign they have placed out the front of the dealership.

Why is this interesting? Well directly opposite them is two other dealerships, BMW and Toyota, both who might have people wanting a change. This is a great example of knowing your target audience when you advertise. The technician accross the road obviously know something about cars, they also familar with the area and have no issues about the commute to work because they already do it.

I have posted a couple of pictures on Flickr which you should be able to see one the feed in the right had column. I am trying to figure out how to now link directly to the pictures, I know if can be done cause I have been sending the pictures to my blog directly before.

Want to go to Blogging University?

OrackeJack (aka Rob Williams) has put together an intro on blogging. I have not had a chance to review all of the content, however the bits I have looked at contain content from Rob and links to other sites. He talks about setting up a blog using Blogger, not a bad thing as it is what I am using. Everything he talks about can be done through the other blogging software out there, sometimes easier sometime not.

If you are interested in getting a blog going it is certainly worth a look.

Insightful Wiki’s

Further to my last post Jeremy Wright also runs ResumeWiki, a very interesting concept. As Jeremy describes it on the Home Page

ResumeWiki is a community edited resume centre. You post your profile (goals, etc) and assume the community of peers will give you comments and possible edits. Feel free to view the ExistingResumes or the RecentlyUpdatedResumes for examples of other peoples’ profiles, resumes and cover letters. You are free to omit personal information (since this is primarily about improving your resume, not getting you exposure).

I like the sound of it! I can see this type of idea working well within departmental environments for goal alignment and team planning.

This brings me to an item I found in ComputerWorld. Where Chad Dickerson gives a short intro into what and where a Wiki could be used for within the IT department. I feel Chad limits his thoughts a little but baby steps are the way with many new’ish concepts. One really good point that Chad makes is trying to draw a line between Wiki’s and Weblogs, he uses a very good example of where one technology would suit over the other. Lee from CommonCraft provides a good description of the differences between a basic message board and a Weblog.

In looking at both of these posts I feel I might try and develop a general guideline as to which technology is best for each circumstance. Maybe something for tonight.

Recruiting blogs

Ok, here is the third post of the day. I noticed that Jason over at Recruiting.com is now offering blogs (I assume for free) on his web site for organisations that want to start a recruiting blog. Fantastic offer Jason!

One person who has taken up Jason on his offer is Jeremy Wright who has created a blog for jobs that might be of interest to bloggers. This is very interesting. Jeremy setup the blog on Nov 17th (USA time I assume), that was sometime Wenesday evening down here. The first jobs were posted same day, which is interesting just to see how quick things can move on the Internet.

I notice that the second job has been posted by Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo fame. Now what is interesting here is Jeremy is not a recruiter he not in HR but I am not surprised that he found this new blog so quickly. I would hope that the person he hires has also already found the blog and applied, given what he is looking for.

Singleton OgilvyInteractive from Sydney have also posted and job, I guess they have got a good handle on blogsphere as well!
Wow I feel like a kid in the candy store, I know I shouldn’t but I do that is just me when technology helps out within the HR space (I know I should see someone about this 🙂 ).

Trade unions and Gen X & Y

The Age had an item yesterday on the possible reason for the failure of Labour at the recent election. While I am not sure I completely agree with the complete item it does raise in interesting perspective that we all need to face over the next 5 – 10 years. That is the make up of the workforce is going to change dramatically with the intro of Gen Y.

The impact of 3 generations in the workforce I firmly believe is going to be more profound than most of us realise. It will impact all areas of business, however the HR field is probably going to be impacted more than any other, ok may that is an overstatement but you get the idea. HR is going to have to rethink all areas of service delivery, it is going to take a certain type of HR Director who can balance the needs of their Baby Boomer CEO (ok generalisation) with that of the Gen Y’s they need to hire to keep the workforce within the organisation for going stale.

The change in service delivery by HR will naturally impact the types and styles of technology used to deliver these services. Now that is an interesting challenge for people like my who work in the HRIS space, I hope I can meet it.

What’s happened this week?

This week has been a little quiet on the blogging front, there are a couple of reasons for this. First and the biggest time! Second I have not really had more to write about, maybe I am having “thinkers block”, or something. Anyway it is Friday and I think things are going to change today as reading through my feeds there are lots of interesting things out there today.

First up from the MSN Search team some interesting principles on what they are going to cover in their blog. I am not an expert on what “should be in a blog” but I like the sounds of what they have to offer.

Microsoft out of touch?

I was reading this item on Yahoo News and was amused by the comments of Steve Vamos and Ben English. Firstly Vamos is yet to use Firefox, I would have thought he would have at least been interested to give it a small go.

However the bit I found interesting was the comment from ben that IE users did not find tabbed browsing important? Hmm I was an IE user and I found it important, hence my switch for most browsing.

I Vamos mentioned that MS are quick at responding to user feedback. Well unless I am mistake Scoble stated in is Podcast with Dave Winer that we are about 12 months away from the next IE release. I also read into their statements that most of the features for this next release have been determined, although I might be completely mistaken.