Blog and be Damned

There is a great article in Radar (a special blog-like section in the SMH) that quotes Cameron Reilly and provides a good summary of why organisations should have a blogging policy (a personal bug bear of mine). It is good to see some press in Australia on this, even if it is not 100% main stream.

Regina Miller is also looking for information of HR professionals who are implement blogs either internally or externally. I would also like to see the results of her requests. She also points us to some great comparisons of blogging policies, better than my attempts :-).

Social bookmarking

In his post on knowledge management and social bookmarks Denham Grey asks “So how exactly are you using social bookmarking?”

We used it at BlogTalk Downunder to track content generated during the conference, a great use. Personally I have not got into using tags to mine knowledge, maybe I should…. The new Technorati Beta allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed based around a tag, maybe this would give me some interesting information.

Is “peer production” the “long tail”?

(Via Dubs.)

This post is a bit vague and more a snapshot of ideas than anything else, but hey it is my blog.

In Business Week a Yale Law School professor, Yochai Benkler, has put together a paper on the changing nature of our economy that is being fuelled by the Internet and cheap computing power. Benkler has dubbed the new economy “commons-based peer production”, to me it sounds a lot like the economics defined by Chris Anderson with the Long Tail, am I missing something and just calling something the long tail that really isn’t?

A point to note he claims that this new economy will be disruptive but will not impact all areas of the current market system, one example “novels won’t be produced in this way”, hang on what about Naked Conversations?

This interview is part of a larger feature from Business Week on the Future of Technology, an interesting read but kind of makes your brain hurt. There is also a great graphic on the migration of the internet from “one to one” to “many to many”.

XFN and HR

Over the last couple of days I have been pondering how XFN could be incorportated into our online world. I know there are some logical places, which is why XFN was created, I am working through some use cases on how it might be integrated into recruitment practices. Another interesting topic is Attention.xml I have been wondering how it might to useful in short listing jobs for job seekers. If you want to find our more about Attention.xml have a listen to the latest Gadget Show from The Podcast Network for some thoughts from Steve Gillmor.

Once I have some cleaner ideas I will write them up.

Google Site Maps

A week or so ago Google Site Map was launched, another Beta product from the mother ship. Google Site Map has been designed so that web content authors can create an XML file to inform Google which areas of their site has been updated. The idea here is that Google can then crawl just the updated portions of the site and not the static portion, therefore the searchable index will be updated in a shorter time frame. The proposed benefit, fresh content for all!

This move is interesting as to some it might seem that Google is admitting defeat in its ability to crawl the web using traditional technology, but are they? As Anil Dash points out there have been proposals for this type of technology for years, and for one reason or another they have not caught on.

Jeremy Zawondy (Yahoo) also provides an alternative using the RPC-ping based technology that most blogging tools have implemented to inform the ping servers that the site has been updated and for it to be included in the search tools like Feedster, and Technorati. This idea seems to have had a mixed reaction among readers, Danny Sullivan provides some thoughts as well.

Overall it seems Google is adding the SiteMap protocol as an option. You can submit to their service via Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting, a popular protocol in the library world, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 syndication feeds, using the link/lastMod fields. Also at a very low-fi level a file just containing URLs. All of which is covered in the Google FAQ. This means that for most of us it looks like we could submit our RSS feed to Google, interesting.

Joel Cheesman quickly joined the discussion allowing us to understand the impact on the recruitment industry. Joel touches on a huge issue for many corporate sites, dynamic content, that search engines have always struggled with. In my previous company this was something that was a real issue as all our content was dynamic. Joel takes this further the benefit for the job seeker is huge as well, nice fresh job content in Google! I have been talking about using Google as a candidate database for a while, with jobs included a matching service could be built using the Google APIs that matches candidates with jobs, I know a bit “pie in the sky” but you never know. The thrid party agencies, job boards, and vertical search engines will also need to review this change as it seems Google is laying the foundation for a move into their market segment. I could extend this thought and through XFN the social networking tools like LinkedIn might also have a limited life, but that is for another day. Overall the recruitment marketplace is going through some significant changes.

For a job seeker it also allows you to inform Google when you online resume is updated so that recruiters are seeing the most up to date version. They will also being to quickly determine which jobs are still available and which have been filled as the indexes should always be up to date. I assume that if corporate recruiters know that they will retrieve quality candidate data from Google they might undertake more data mining for the hard to find candidate within the Google index.

If you are a Google Search Appliance corporate customer I wonder if you will get an update that includes the SiteMap feature? This would allow faster searching within the corporate intranet, a great addition for knowledge management.

Oh and if you are a WordPress user, you can get a Site Map plug in already.

SAP and PHP?

A bit of a technical post today, that’s not to say some of my other ones have not been :-).

Over the last few weeks I have been playing with the idea that I might write some PHP code, mainly because my hosting provider provides PHP and MySQL and I like to tinker. Today I found an interesting post within the SAP Developer Network on using PHP to access SAP data. While the example given is for SD the same could be completed for the HR/Pay modules.

After reading the post I started doing some further digging within SDN and found several items relating to the use of PHP with SAP. Such as this one around using the PHP RFC function module to get a list of active users on a target system. There is a primer on getting started with PHP on SAP and SourceForge has the SAPRFC download that allows you to call ABAP functions from within PHP via RFC calls.

This is very interesting and allows for some interesting open source based projects that can connect back into the corporate ERP backend.

Oh and if you are into SAP there is an RSS feed of the SDN blogs http://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/q/weblogs_rss?x-ver=1.0.

Gretchen rants about hiring managers

Last week Gretchen posted a fairly blunt post about the role of recruiters in large companies highlighting in particular some of the issues within Microsoft. When I first read the post I raised an eye brow at the honestly but thought nothing more of it. How wrong was I, and it seems Gretchen.

The post was picked up by CNet and titled “Recruiting headaches at Microsoft” and then somehow the CNet news story ended up on the front page of Google News. The long and the short is the post has caused a major stir, Gretchen has since posted an explanation.

The post highlights the VERY fine line all bloggers walk along between being honest and over stepping the mark. While her post might be a little bit over the line and in reflection some sentences probably should not have been included, I know I have posted and then thought oops maybe that was too much we all do it. It is when you step over the line that you realise where the line tritely is until that time you only speculate.

What Gretchen does highlight a very real issue facing all companies and for this Gretchen should be congratulated. In the long run I hope it opens the eyes of both recruiters, hiring managers and candidates of the different issues facing all sides of the recruiting equation. There are several portions of the post that should hit home however I found her last paragraph to have to most truths:-

But I hereby warn ye, next Microsoft employee who sends me the next great recruiting idea like searching our resume database or sponsoring a one-time event, I will not be so nice. There’s no silver bullet, and to recruit top talent, you’ve got to be prepared to invest long-term in solving the problem. When you are ready to talk about that, you know where I am.

Top talent is hard to find, and sometimes top talent in one company is not top talent in another. Building a high performing organisation takes time and requires a major investment, one of the largest inputs into this process is new hires and the process should be treated with the same level of respect as when negotiating any supply contract that is valued at several hundred thousand dollars.