Over 400 blogs and 500 posts in 24 hours!

We have now broken the 400 blog mark over at community.hrblogs.org, with well over 500 posts in a 24 hour period. Being one who subscribes to the overall RSS feed from the site it is no wonder it is taking me so long to get through my RSS reader!

A quick review on the sites we now have:-

(Update: I got the average numbers wrong a problem with the way I am storing the data they should be right now.) 

Category Number of Sites Highest Technorati Rank Average Technorati Rank
Benefits 2 77,874 731,676
Career Development 32 192 471,107
Education and Learning 72 38 491,513
Employment Brand 6 2,791 228,981
Employment Law 42 13,749 410,246
HR Strategy 66 2,396 728,601
HR Technology 17 49,687 634,962
Knowledge Management 11 2,202 310,163
Labor Movements 6 5,865 318,388
Outsourcing 2 706,869 878,493
Performance 2 29,390 247,709
Recruitment 146 1,309 569,164
Remuneration 2 1,385,479 1,385,479

Categories with the highest recorded Technorati ranks are in the Education & Learning*, Career Development, Recruitment categories. The large average Technorati ranking indicates we have a fairly unpopular community, what I mean is we are not popular with the masses. It also means that using traditional tools like Technorati’s Top 100 blogs or the Feedster Top 500 will not find our sites.

A few months ago I started storing the RSS feeds from all of the sites registered and I now have a total of over 19,000 posts in the database. This got me thinking, who is linking to who, ie do we have an introvert community who links inwards or outwards. I am currently doing some analysis on this, check back soon!
For now on average each site has created 81 posts, however the Labor Movements category has on average posted 651 times for each of the 6 registered sites. When I remove them from the calculations then the average number of posts drops to 33 per blog.

One final note I have added two new categories for sites Job Seekers and General Management, I will look to re-classify some of the sites over the next couple of weeks.

* Just a point to note I am not activitly adding sites to this category there are just too many. For example James Farmer has over 10,000 sites on his edublogs site.

Why we hate HR 2.0 (Will this hurt)?

Fast Company has just posted a counter point to the one and only “Why we hate HR” story from last year.  They list some findings from a survey conducted by  Jacquelyn Thorp Kinworthy, a professor at Cal State-Fullerton and CEO/founder of HR-Coach Products and Services.  In summary:-

1) Companies hire inexperienced and unqualified people to handle HR, but expect them to perform at higher levels than they are qualified.

2) Companies do not invest in HR as they do in other departments.

3) Many small to medium size companies have HR people that are strategic partners.

Read the post for their thoughts but what do you think?

New sites in the HR blogging community

I have just been added a few new sites over at community.hrblogs.org, a few I found, and a few who submitted themselves.  The newest sites in the community are:-

Get Career

Confessions of an HR Director

Focus on Talent and Workforce Performance

Australian HR Technology Thoughts

MAPping Company Success

Charles A. Krugel, Labor & Employment Law, HR Law

Welcome to the HR blogosphere!

Tools for bloggers

Darren Rowse has released is list of A – Z of Professional Blogging a fantastic list of 124 different tools and services for the professional and not so professional blogger. Some of the ones that jumped out at me were (they are not necessarily new or the only ones in their market segment they just stood out):-

How to manage gaming geeks, or any geek for that matter

Just finished listening to show number 51 from The Cranky Middle Manager Show where Wayne spends time chatting with Matt Manuel from EA who looks after the development of FIFA 2006.

A great show with some really interesting ideas covering on-boarding, peer mentoring, and team management. It seems that a number of the manager’s at EA regularly listen to the show along with another management podcast Manager Tools.
EA sounds like a very dynamic organisation trialing new ideas both internally and externally.

links for 2006-06-26

  • A unique viral marketing event undertaken by a crewing gum company. Matt originally travelled the world and danced at different location. Now he has been paid to do the same by a crewing gum company.
  • I have seen Linkie Wikie referenced several times today, I can only guess what it is trying to do. Althought I will probably be wrong.

4th July – Declare independence from mainstream media!

Found this interesting idea on Cameron’s Brain, declare 4th July as a day of independence from mainstream media. Not being in the US the 4th July is usually just another day, so this is a great idea to give it meaning. The idea was kicked around but a number of people on the New England Podcaster’s List, after initially been given legs by Steve Garfield.

Eric Skiff has produced a number of promo’s for use in podcasts, there is even a tag for the idea july4us, you can’t have an idea these days without a tag!

So what is it and how can you participate? Eric provides a great summary:-

We’re declaring our independence from Mainstream Media! We’re reporting news you won’t hear on “the big 3.” We’re playing great artists that clear channel’s computer playlists have ignored. We’re creating outstanding video content free from the shackles of the 30 minute timeslot!

Who are we? We’re just like you! We’re creative individuals who were sick of being force-fed the same focus-group distilled junk year after year.

On July Fourth, declare your own independence from Mainstream Media. Turn off your TV and turn on your computer. Plug an MP3 player with great music podcasts into your stereo while you barbeque. Watch an indie movie or a video podcast. Read news that’s not being reported on CNN.

I wonder just how much I would miss if I turned off MSM for 24 hours, probably not a lot, neither would you so give it a go!

Update: Here is MSM prediciting it’s own death. (Hat tip again to Cameron)

Restoring my son’s computer

Last weekend I had a bright idea of rebuilding my son’s computer, an old HP Pavilion 6535 we bought while we were in Canada and had shipped back to Australia in 2000.

Bad idea!

Initially I could not find the HP restore disks. But being a bit of a geek I had an old Windows 98 SE disk and thought “He doesn’t need all the fancy additional software shipped by HP let’s go vanilla!”.

Steps planned:-

  1. Re-format HD using Windows 98 SE recovery disk
  2. Install Windows 98 SE
  3. Install MS Works
  4. Upgrade to Office 2000
  5. Let son loose on new system

Steps taken:-

  1. Re-format HD using Windows 98 SE recovery disk
  2. Install Windows 98 SE
  3. Errors on re-boot!

During the rebot process I received errors about missing files, vnetsup.vxd, vredir.vxd, dfs.vxd WTF!  I just installed a fresh version of Windows 98SE, how can I be missing files.  Anyway the system continued to boot and then I received an error saying Microsoft Networking would not work because the file msnp.dll was not found!  Ignore this for now I think.
Once booted up I installed the network drivers for the Wireless card to get the system back on the network.  Then off to the Microsoft web site to Critical Updates, all 20 of them.   Video display all messed up, only supporting 680 x 720 in 4 colours!

Obviously I need the HP drivers and quick.
Went to HP web site to download required drivers. Other than the Intel drivers for the on board video card, nothing was there. Every search on the web site came back to use the Recovery CD, which I did not have. The biggest issue was that the sound card was not working. Ahh I know how to fix that, go to the product spec’s page look up the device and search for the drivers.  The only thing on the page was ” Crystal audio chip”, what!  Not only do they not provide drivers for download they don’t event provide part numbers so that you can do it yourself!  Straight to Google for some Googlejuice.

Search Crystal audio drivers pavilion 6535, and find I am not alone with these problems.  As it happens the chipset is Crystal CS4299 chip.  The drivers are available in two places.  Downloaded, installed and now we have sound.

Downloaded the Intel video drivers and we have a reasonable display.  Almost back to working order.

HP really needs to re-think their support of consumer PCs.

Interviewing for Google

We all know Google is a tough place to interview for, a bit like Microsoft. I came across this old post detailing two questions asked during an interview at Google, provides some interesting insight into Google as an organisation. The questions were:-

1. You have been shrunk down to the size of a nickel and tossed into a blender. You are told that the blender blades will start in 60 seconds.What would you do to save your life?

2. Design and describe a system/application that will most efficiently produce a report of the top 1 million Google search requests.These are the particulars.

* You are given 12 servers to work with. They are all dual-processor machines with 4Gb of RAM, 4x400GB hard drives and networked together.(Basically, nothing more than high-end PC’s)

* The log data has already been cleaned for you. It consists of 100 Billion log lines, broken down into 12 320 GB files of 40-byte search terms per line.

* You can use only custom written applications or available free open-source software.

How would you go? What is also interesting are the comments left on the post.