It has been an interesting week for Australian celebrities, first Steve Irwin and now Peter Brock! It seems Peter Brock was killed in an accident while driving in the West Australian Targa Rally, his car hit a tree about 40 kms east of Perth.
One of the great legends of motor sport in Australia.
It seems online jobs ads are still on the rise in Australia. The latest online job ad figures were released yesterday and they have increased again for the 8th month in a row. Bob Olivier, Director of Olivier Group is quoted at saying :-
“The rate of increase can’t be sustained forever, so we’ve actually seen it coming off slightly in the last quarter,” he said.
“But all things considered, when you’ve had interest rate rises in the last month and/or price rises, the fact we’ve got any growth at all is still remarkable.”
What I find just as interesting is the numbers only include the top 3 job boards (Seek, CareerOne and MyCareer), for example JobSearch, the Australian government job site has over 84,000 jobs when compared to Seek’s 135,000 jobs could significantly impact the Online Job Index. Not to mention the vertical search tool Recruit.net with 263,000 jobs in Australia!
What about the “long tail” of online jobs ads in Australia? Google Base has over 1,300, the NowHiring network of sites (1,100 on Nowhiring.com.au, 1,000 on Gurus.com.au, on 35 adage.com.au), or JobsGarage or the very new FindIt (Pre-Beta and just getting going)? What would all of these sites do to the numbers?
It is sad that Steve Irwin died yesterday his family, his animals and the environment will all be impacted by his passing. Steve died while filming a documentary on the deadliest animals in the sea, ironic in a morbid kind of way. Apparently he had no chance of surviving the sting ray puncture to his lung.
There a two aspects of this story that are a bit out there. Firstly there a calls for him to have a state funeral to honour him and secondly as of 7am 5 Sept 2006 (AEST), the 3 of the top 6 searches on Technorati relate to Steve Irwin, on gnoos 1 out of the top 5 searches and 3 out of the toip 5 tags are about him. Even Yahoo search has 1,200 references to “steve irwin death”, in less than 24 hours!
The guy was popular!
An issue facing the tech blogosphere is that many people both internal and external to it claim that the blogosphere is just an echo chamber and nothing new comes out.
From my limited view point I do not think that the HR blogosphere is an echo chamber, sometimes I feel that we need to link to each other more but that is for another time.
To ensure we do not end up an echo chamber have a look at Chris Pirillo’s 10 tips to eliminate the echo chamber effect.
Visit Recruit.net to find Australia jobs.
I subscribe to Presentation Zen to find the latest and greatest trends in presentations. Some of the presentations they reference are fantastic others I don’t really relate to but I still stay subscribed. So today when I saw a couple of people referring to the Top 10 Presentations I was interested.
KnowHR have pulled together a great list of their top 10 presentations. If you don’t subscribe to Presentation Zen you definitely need to review these 10 (and even if you do).
(You still should subscribe to Presentation Zen 🙂 )
There has been a bit of talk recently about viewing blogs on mobile devices. Dave Winer has even built a tool to help out. Personally I don’t tend to use a mobile device to view anything, the costs are just too prohibitive here in Australia. However I do think the idea is very cool and when I saw a Alex King’s plugin for WordPress I decided to give it a try.
So here is the mobile edition of my blog:-
http://www.specht.com.au/michael/wp-mobile.php
It was very easy to install, hope you like it.
Trevor Cook dropped me a note today saying that a new classifieds service has gone into pre-Beta in Australia. The service is FindIt.
One the surface it is a classifieds tool just like CraigsList, Google Base and many others. The scope compared to other Australian services is different, FindIt has categories covering Jobs, Real Estate, Vehicles, Marketplace (think eBay), Directories, Events, and Community. From day one the site has lots of neat features, RSS, tags, comments, Google Maps.
What will be how the jobs side of things shakes out in what is already a very crowded market in Australia.
Checkout call center jobs at JobsInCallCenters.com.
I am in search of a new name for my blog. Kevin feels I should keep the old one I do see his point but I am still going to change it.
For now I am looking at calling the blog “Wabi Sabi” a Japanese term which roughly acknowledges three simple ideas nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. Something I felt fits with blogging.
To quote Wikipedia:-
The words wabi and sabi do not translate easily. Wabi originally referred to the loneliness of living in nature, remote from society; sabi meant “chill”, “lean” or “withered”. Around the 14th century these meanings began to change, taking on more positive connotations.[1] Wabi now connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and man-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object. Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.
Wabi and sabi both suggest sentiments of desolation and solitude. In the Mahayana Buddhist view of the universe, these may be viewed as positive characteristics, representing liberation from a material world and transcendence to a simpler life. Mahayana philosophy itself, however, warns that genuine understanding cannot be achieved through words or language, so accepting wabi-sabi on nonverbal terms may be the most appropriate approach.
Not sure if the name will stick but I thought I would give it a try for a week or so.
I recently upgraded the version of Norton Internet Security I have running at home, this has meant that I can now use Google’s Calendar on my home PC.
Now I am looking into how to use Google Calendar for our household calendar. My vision, if you call it that, is to have a family calendar editable by both my wife and I. Then we can both also have a personal calendar, synchronised to work calendaring systems and PDA’s. This way we can both keep up to date on what is going one. The final piece of the puzzle would be to get a mini-tablet PC attached to a bracket in the kitchen/family room so that we can view the calendar’s in the morning an evenings to ensure we don’t forget anything. The mini-tablet PC would replace the old fashioned paper calendar that typically hangs in our kitchen. (The other uses for such a device are massive but let’s keep to the calendaring side of things!)
So far I have achieved the following:-
I am not sure where the problem lies but my some of work calendar items are not appearing in the right time on my Google calendar, and my Google calendar items are not appearing in my work calendar. 😦
I know I am not the only one looking for such an integrated solution. Alex King has recently put a call out for an end to end calendaring solution.
It seems that version V2.5 of the Google Site Maps plugin was causing the issues. Once disabled, Live Writer works as expected.
Now trying V3 Beta of Google Site Maps and see if it behaves with Live Writer (or the other way around), hence the multiple posts :-).
Update: Yes the v3 Beta does work!
Michael Specht 