Interesting Statistics

A quick observation. I have been blogging for almost 2 years (blogoservary coming up next week) therefore I felt it good to review some statistics. Here they are:-

  • Total of 779 posts
  • Around 2.1 posts/day
  • Around 31.16 posts/month
  • Total of 449 comments (Not enough, speak up!)
  • Technorati Rank 51,512 (dropping at the moment)
  • Technorati is tracking 119 links from 52 sites
  • Google has 451 links to http://www.specht.com.au/michael
  • Alexa has a traffic ranking as 478,593 (increasing at the moment 🙂 )
  • Feedburner has 147 subscribers through http://feeds.feedburner.com/myhrblog (increasing SLOWLY)
  • A majority of subscribers are using Bloglines (55), followed by My Yahoo (15), followed by NewsGator Online & Rojo (11)

The sinking sub

Being on a sub going down would be no fun! No one wants to be stuck at the bottom of the ocean in a sub. I suspect this is how the people at PubSub are feeling right now. Bob Wyman has openly spoken about the troubles PubSub is facing (via The RSS Blog). It seems that after an internal power struggle minority shareholders are holding the company hostage.

What struck me was the openness of Bob’s post:-

What has prevented us moving forward is a battle with a group of minority shareholders, some of whom claim to be lead by our ex-CEO Salim Ismail and are, in any case, primarily his “friends and family.” This group is using very unusual clauses in our Shareholder’s agreements to block mergers or financings.

A very open conversation with his customers!

Companies using Google Adwords

(Another post from Writely.)

I have noticed an interesting new trend over the last month or so. Australian HR technology and services companies advertising via Google AdSense. I have mostly noticed them when going through the archives of my blog and community.hrblogs.org. Companies I have seen advertising are, but not limited to:-

I have also seen organisations using Google Adwords to advertise jobs, specifically the Department of Defence and FlightCentre even more impressive. One of my tips from my online recruitment presentation .

Good to see Australian companies using the technology.

links for 2006-06-13

  • Jobster is building the Semantic Web/Microformatted web with it’s new post direct to Google and Craigslist features, now this is the start of killer features. Job boards and traditional vendors need to be afraid, very afraid of Jobster because they are o
  • Joel goes big with the auction of his activities at the forthcoming SHRM conference with JobCentral as the winner of Cheezhead’s SHRM Conquest auction!! JobCentral get some serious advertising from the deal and Joel get US$7K in the process. What with

Test Writely Post

This is a test blog post from Writely the Web 2.0 word processor owned by Google. I have been playing with Google‘s new Spreadsheet and thought I should also look again at Writely. With Gmail , Google Calendar , Writely , and the new Google Spreadsheet Google are fast becoming a serious competitor to the Microsoft Office suite.

In addition to the word processing features Writely allows you to post directly to your blog including tags very cool.

Social Engineering

I found this very disturbing article from Techmemeorandum about using social engineering to compromise an organisations security defences, the troubling part about this example was how easily the defences were breached. As seen in this quote they had 75% success rate allowing them access to a vast number of systems in the target organisation.

After about three days, we figured we had collected enough data. When I started to review our findings, I was amazed at the results. Of the 20 USB drives we planted, 15 were found by employees, and all had been plugged into company computers. The data we obtained helped us to compromise additional systems, and the best part of the whole scheme was its convenience. We never broke a sweat. Everything that needed to happen did, and in a way it was completely transparent to the users, the network, and credit union management.

The troubling part in this example is the USB thumb drives in question are very popular in organisations as productivity devices.