Multinational networks

One of the most amazing aspects of blogging is the online connections that can be formed. These networks would most likely never be formed offline. Take for example this post from Afshin Dabiri who writes about HR from Iran. I tried to comment to say thanks for the link as Ahshin has done on my blog only to realise that I was unable. I do not understand Persian, even though my browser can type the characters! Ahshin is not the only reader from Iran, Delaram has also commented. Thanks for the readership and the comments guys.

There has been lots of debate over the last few months about the size of the blogosphere, many commentators just cover English language blogs. However there is a whole other world out there that “we” typically miss. I wish I could participate in these conversations but due to language barriers (on my side not there’s) I am unable, I cannot even do a Babel Fish Translation.

A $5,000 bounty, but does it work?

Seth Godin is looking for a chief engineer and is offerig a $5,000.00 Bounty (aka referral bonus) to anyone who find them for him to be paid 6 months after hire. This is interesting because again it shows the usage of blogs for recruitment.

Writing a professional based blog, not a corporate blog, develops a network of contact like any other form of professional activity, this is not a new idea it has been happening in the IT industry for a while now. The questions are:

Has it extended beyond this industry?

Have non technical industries understood the value of professional blogs and are they using them?

The growth in social networking services like LinkedIn does indicate that we are seeing a growth in online networking, but is it translating to blogs, I hope so. Blogs offer a unique method of personal publishing that allows opinion/thoughts to be presented in a public forum where feedback can be provided through a network of readers. Through the use of trackbacks and pings (regardless that some feel they have out grown there usefulness due to spam) provide a citation framework for professional recognition.

A free blogging tool for HR professionals

Over the last few months I have been exchanging emails with James Farmer over several of his different projects all of which get me fired up.

One such project which I have borrowed the idea from is edublogs to create hrblogs.org a free blog tool for HR professionals! Over the last few weeks I have been setting the service up and now it is ready for use. hrblogs.org is a free blogging service for HR professionals that will provide WordPress based blogs to anyone who works within the HR profession regardless of location. If you work as a generalist, manager, recruiter, industrial relation specialist, or remuneration and benefits, in fact any area of HR, hrblogs.org will enable you to establish a free blog. hrblogs.org uses WordPress Multiuser, the multiuser version of WordPress, which is not production software and therefore there might be minor bugs.

The features provided by hrblogs.org :

  • Fast, easy and free
  • Choice of user names
  • Use of a WordPress blogging engine
  • Choice of WordPress themes (25 to choose from, more coming)
  • Upload photos (10MB of space)
  • and more…

Get blogging in minutes!

Video conferencing

OnRec has a story on the mobile phone provider 3 is using videos as part of the recruitment process in the UK. What 3 is doing is apply an automatic filter on candidates before even looking at them, if you don’t already have a 3 phone then they don’t want to hire you. A great method of culling candidates.

A unique usage of 3G mobile phones, but just a play on existing technology we have been able to conduct video interviews for well over 10 years. Today it is very easy to conduct video interviews using a desktop PC, and IM client (Yahoo or MSN) and a broadband connection. Usage of such technology is very good when having to conduct long distance interviews before you know the candidate is enough of a fit to fly them in for a face to face interview.

links for 2005-09-07

The keys to your data

It has been a while since I tapped out a post on security and privacy but today I read several posts that got me inspired again.

Bruce Schneier (thanks for Kim Cameron for the pointer) picked up on the two sets of stolen keys for the Sydney train system that allowed the thieves access to all trainings on the City Rail network. Now the inspiring portion. I read the story and thought how funny, Bruce saw a completely different take global secrets. Now after reading Bruce’s item on global secrets I can now see correlation back in the HR/Payroll space (personally I find this cool how ideas build on each other but that could just be me).

A global secret for all of the non technical readers is a secret that once known either allows you access to everything and you either have or you don’t. Kind of security talk for you are either “in” or “out”. For obvious reasons they are bad, but you would be surprised how often they are used. For example how many people use the same password everywhere, this is your own personal global secret, once the password is compromised then everything is compromised.

Now within an HR/Payroll space this gets interesting. Now I don’t want to scare anyone but you need to beware of the security landscape for your core HR/Payroll system. Is there a global secret for your core system? Do you use your own personal global secret for the access to the core system? Now taking this further what about your IT department. Do they operate with a global secret for the database or your application? Maybe you should ask.

Another item that got me pumped was Kim Cameron’s experience with being tracked by his bluetooth phone! During a recent conference a series of scanning devices installed in the presentation rooms as an experiment to track conference participants. While Kim seemed a little miffed he understood where they were coming from and was in fact used as an example during one of the last sessions where on a presentation slide mapped his movements during the conference, including when he ducked out to take a phone call.

Now that is scary! But apparently easy to do, the average IT geek could probably hack together such a system in your office without you knowing. Where does that leave the company and you from a privacy point of view, what sort of industrial issues could it create if not properly managed.

More on GoDaddy

Well after a week of going around the table I have cancelled the GoDaddy service. I guess it was just not for me.

I ended up having to use a command line interface for FTP as the 3 different FTP clients kept dropping connections and then immediately trying to reconnect. When they tried to reconnect they seemed to trip the limit set by GoDaddy of 3 concurrent connections for FTP traffic. Once this happened I was locked out of the account for anywhere between 10 minutes and 1 hour depending on how many connection attempts the FTP client undertook before I closed it down. I just do not know why this is the case, maybe there is some for of queuing going on.

I also conducted several trace routes for technical support. Which seemed to me to be fine on my side but according to them there was a problem with my ISP causing latency. In looking further the issue does not seem to be with my ISP, the packets leave them on the 3rd hop, and go off the Sprint undersea cables between Australia and US which is where the latency begins.

There also seemed to be some confusion within the support team ab0ut which services support DNS wildcard aliases and which did not, a service I really need and was willing to pay for.

Anyway to cut a long story short I have cancelled the service and will look somewhere else. I filled in the survey as to why I cancelled, and they refunded my money. So we are all square which it great. In hindsight maybe I am just a difficult customer or maybe I did not research the service enough. I guess I will never know.

In a real positive spin I have also received an email from Laurie Anderson from the “Office of the President” for GoDaddy looking for feedback on the issue. Great kudos for this and thank you.