Changes to Australian workplace laws

There is a new web site from the AWU to campaign against the Howard government’s proposed workplace law changes. (Via Blogging and podcasting in Australia)

I am interested to see the unoin movement moving their campaign’s online, I have been following the development of LaborNet and WorkersOnline with interest. I am also interested about the lack of RSS support within Australia, certainly the major newspapers have feeds but most other publishers are yet to get going, more than willing to point them in the right direction.

Social reputation and authority

Happened to be browsing Feedburner today and found an interesting post in their blog about a new API. The Feed Awareness API looks very interesting and seems to already have support from some of the feed reader software. The best way to describe it is to quote the Feedburner site.

Feed Awareness describes the extent and frequency with which a publisher’s feed and its content items are consumed, clicked on, and referred to by independent sources (i.e., “syndicated”).

Is it similar to Attention.xml, yes, is it the same no. While the Feed Awareness API tells you how many people have “consumed” the feed, how many people have clicked on each post and how many times it has been referred to it does not cover some of the other pieces of Attention.XML, such as:-

  • Date last updated
  • Social relationships of the author
  • Reading information such as last read time and time to read

Both technologies can help with building the reputation and authority of a specific site/digital identity. This reputation could then be used as an input into the background checking process of a candidate, I know this is a stretch but bear with me. Recruiters are already using search engines to check up on candidates so why not build that into the ATS system? The social reputation provided by your digital identity is a great foundation.

links for 2005-06-16

What is a network?

Jen from Jen on Friday’s brings up an interesting question, what is a network and when do you know if you belong to one?

Her comments indicate that the network is only there when you know you belong to one. If someone reads your RSS feed does that mean they are in a network with you or is a network only formed when there is cross recognition of both parties? What are the new social norms for these virtual social networks?

Jen has belonged to my knowledge input network for several weeks now, I have been reading her posts and they have been inputs into some of my thoughts, admittedly I am yet to blog about them so little time!

The future of recruiting

I have mentioned that before, the future of job/applicant search will be in Google, something I know Joel Cheesman agrees with.

Anyway it seems that this future is quickly becoming a reality, with rumours that Google to provide listings search. Joel does a good job of highlighting the relevant parts. While the item in Red Herring does not specifically mention jobs, they are an obvious move as there is real revenue to be had.

So what about the new entrants to vertical search and the dot jobs domain? In the end I do not think it will matter. Yes dot jobs will get a higher ranking in search results, if SHRM can keep the integrity of the TLD. The real impact will be is for the job seeker, this was highlighted by John Sumsers also mentions this in Driving Traffic 5. As both Joel and John mentioned if Google start listing jobs then search engine ranking will become a major factor. This will mean that recruiters will need to understand enough about search engine ranks to be able to work with the IT professionals who run their job sites to ensure the best ranking possible.

This will scare many recruiters.

Social bookmark searching

Scoble points to a new social bookmark search and exploration engine called Gataga.

There has been lots of talk in the last week about Technorati being a third party aggregator of content when it comes to tags. Gataga seems to be doing just the same thing just a little differently, the interface and results are very Google like just abit slower. The tools is useful for mining tags to find related sites without a lot of the noise one gets from searching via Google, Yahoo or MSN but I am not sure it provides you the most relevant results nor is it the most up to date. I searched for BlogtalkDownunder the tag that was created at the recent conference, what did I get? Nothing! On Technorati, 57 items.

Maybe they are just getting started, anyone know more?

Multiple posts and del.icio.us

Sorry for the multiple link posts, just me trying to get my daily del.icio.us links posting. As with many people I come across lots of great links and so I am beginning to play with either publishing a daily listing here or building my very own linkblog.

If I post a daily listing here I will be using the daily post feature of del.icio.us, it took a while for me to get the settings right for WordPress and it seems that WordPress ignores the category setting in del.icio.us. For those of you that are interested here are the settings:-

job_name : My WordPress Daily Links
out_name : WordPress User ID (I would recommend a low level say 2 for security’s sake)
out_pass : Password for the above user
out_url : The URL to your xmlrpc.php file
out_time : The time you want the post to appear based on GMT, oh and if you chnage the time you get multiple posts like I did
out_blog_id :
out_cat_id : The category you want to posts to appear in, however as I mentioned it does not seem to be recognised.

links for 2005-06-15

links for 2005-06-15