Jim has brought me out

Jim Durbin has begun a discussion at Recruiting.com on a Link Swap to promote HR related blogs. While the promotion of HR blogs is a fantastic idea but a straight out link swap is probably not the best way to go about it.

Good blogs require good content, good content gets noticed and the blog gains readers.  For us to have a great HR blogosphere we need great content.
But it is not easy to get noticed, you need to gain the attention of readers.

Last year I created an OPML file of all the HR related blogs I could find, around 190 at the time. In January Double Dubs suggested that I use the hrblogs.org to help promote and create more of a community within the HR blogosphere as the OPML file was only useful to techie people. He also suggested that I should try and make a tool to help new entrants to the blogosphere find other HR blogs.
I have been a bit slow in getting my act together, sorry Double Dubs.  But Jim’s discussion has prompted me to let loose in the wild community.hrblogs.org! This little animal is not really house trained but I thought others might find it useful to see what people are talking about and what HR blogs are out there. I will try and train the animal so that it does not spontaneously self-destruct every so often and to provide it with more features.  But for now you will have to put up with an untrained animal.
The features right now:-

  • Consolidated listing of over 340 HR related blogs, categorised by type
  • Ability to sort listing by Technorati rank, date last updated an alphabetically
  • Ability to show the latest posts from an individual site and subscribe to the feed
  • Ability to view to a consolidated RSS feed of the overall site, or by particular category, and scroll through all posts tracked 30 posts at a time.
  • Ability to subscribe to a consolidated RSS feed (last 30 posts) of the overall site, or by particular category. If you are only interested in Employment Law then subscribe just to that category.
  • Consolidated OPML file of all sites, broken up by category.
  • There is also a Top 10 lists section showing either consolidated or by category the last 10 sites updated, the top 10 as ranked in Technorati.
  • Submit a site form, if I have missed you site and you want to get listed, fill in the form. If I have listed your site and you don’t want to be listed or the information is wrong drop me an email.

An interesting statistic, of the 342 blogs, there have been over 220 posts in the last 24 hours. Yesterday there was over 1 post a day.

I hope some of you find this new site useful.

links for 2006-04-20

Job seekers and blogs

There has been a bit of a rush this week on posts about using blogs to help you find a job. Previously most of the discussion and example have been about corporations promoting themselves through blogs.  To a lesser extent job seekers using a blog to create a micro-brand that increases their standing within a particular industry, self-promotion by stealth.

Today Hugh Mcloud points us to Tom Raffery who is in the market and wants a job.  Tom lets us know what he wants, a job. 

Google Calendar only 20% there

3 or 4 days ago Google inflicted Google Calendar on the world, yet another in their long line of Beta products.  Being part geek I tried it out over the Easter break and within about 2 minutes became very unimpressed with the product.  Based on the bugs, quirks and workarounds this product does not look like it has been through even the most basic of testing.  Some of the issues I came across are listed below.

  1. Unable to edit an event once you have added it to your calendar.  This seems to be a common issue if you are running personal firewall software such as Norton Internet Security or ZoneAlarm.  You can get around the issue by disabling security while you edit your calendar!  As Barbara Krasnoff from Information Week says “you’ve got real problems if people need to disable their security features in order to use your product.”
  2. Entering events with days of the week in the title.  Google has built some intelligence into the tool to help you quickly create events, but try and create and event for “Good Friday” or “Easter Monday”, no luck.  You get events on the next Friday or Monday called “Good” and “Easter” respectively.
  3. Once you successfully create an event and go to edit it, there are no visual clues on how to change attributes.  You need to click on the attribute and then the field will become a textbox.
  4. Within a corporate environment the Calendar does not seem to work, resulting in a partially loaded page with Javascript Object errors.  This I can only assume has to do with point 1 where Google is doing some really bad stuff from a security point of view.
  5. No hCalendar support and generally no standards support.  Rod Booth from Innovation Creators provides a good summary of the issues.
  6. Issues with importing events and timezones, Cameron Rielly noted this issue and found a workaround.  Create a calendar, import, create a new calendar import from first into second and then start using the second calendar. Doh!

Google, get back to us when you start to actually test your products before you ship them, even in beta.

Google Base in the click stream

HitWise Lee Ann Prescott provides us with an interesting usage breakdown for Google Base during March 2006. Shopping & Classifieds sites getting 18% of Google Base’s downstream traffic, with nearly 8% of traffic going to job sites. Lee Ann ponders that Google Base is a part shopping directory, part recipe search service, part classified service, to me it seems a bit confused and not really gaining ground with on 0.00017% share of the US Internet Visits, compared to Google Video which had about 0.020% share during the same period (NY Times had about 0.078% in November).

What is also interesting is that jobs provided Google Base the spike in traffic during the January period.

links for 2006-04-11

More on HR 2.0 or is it 3.0?

(Yes I know I am flogging a dead horse.)

Systematic Viewpoints has provided his opinion/views/position on HR, SOA and Web 2.0, within which he has questioned how to use RSS for an integrated worklist and poses several questions. All very important and shows a snippet of the issues/concerns that need to be resolved, I have tried to provide my personal view on each.

  1. (H)ow does it become aware of whether I’ve inherited a new task in Taleo, or the HRMS, or Oracle EBS, or 14 other integrated systems only seconds after I finished a prior one? Answer:- SSE
  2. How do I remove the alert for a completed task off the Enterprise Portal without the user having to refresh a screen for someone who gets dozens of approval messages daily? Answer:- AJAX
  3. How does RSS scale to a source system that sends out upwards of 40,000 messages a day? Answer:- BoingBoing, Feedburner, Google News
  4. How come I have to explain what RSS is to my technology partners, those who would have to maintain this when it stops working, somewhere in the world that is inevitably dinner or sleep time somewhere else? Answer:- Good question, you might need some new technology partners

Ok maybe these are not real answers but I firmly believe that we can resolve these types of issues. Check out Jeff Nolan’s post from last month for some more ideas (Via Moonwatcher Visionaries).

I found Thomas’s latest post on the discussion thought provoking and right on the money:-

Version control, accuracy, privacy, security and so on become ever more important. I think this is where MDM (master data management) will play a key role. To take advantage of the emerging technologies, more than ever you need strong, reliable and stable core system, something that provides that single source of the truth. There is a paradox in there somewhere. (you cant be trully flexible unless you have a strong backbone or something equally yogasque)

Oh boy how true, and he followed that with this gem:-

Maybe I’m wrong but I reckon a lot of niche HR software vendors will face a challenge.

They will be increasingly squashed between the “single vendor suite for core business processes” directive and the ease of mashups and business-analyst driven composites

Exactly. The quick and the dead.

links for 2006-04-10