Posted by Mike Bijon April 19, 2006
The Boston Globe article “Blogs ‘essential’ to a good career“ makes some excellent points about why spending time writing web “articles” and “commentary” is worth far more than some small amount of income from running AdSense advertising. Nonetheless, I have to disagree with their main points, as already summarized by Tom Raferty’s “‘Gis a job!”:
- Blogging creates a network
- Blogs set you up as an expert in your field
- Blogs give you a leg up when you meet someone new
These primary points are accurate, but take little account of: a) most job-seekers don’t promote themselves well/professionally in their resumes (…won’t “personal” blogs end up even less professional?); and b) most employers aren’t actively seeking candidates on the “open” web. Nonetheless, Tom Raferty appears to be both bright and relatively professional based on my readings of his blog – but he’s still not getting any job offers from that exposure. To tell the truth, he would have been a great candidate for a position as a director of IT that I was just working with a client to help fill. If not for the fact that Tom lives in Ireland and the position is in Los Angeles, I still probably wouldn’t have contacted him because I neither had his feed on my reading list nor did I know he was looking for a job. Truth be told, my client and I didn’t put in enough time to search to blogosphere well.
Most jobs are filled with willing employees and aren’t worth spending that job’s entire annual salary just to find and entice “one” perfect candidate. Where should we have started anyway? Most good bloggers are intelligent and discuss a variety of topics, mkaing it even harder to narrow down the search to “the one”. The blogosphere is a big, messy community and even blogger profiles on Technorati (the first place I would have looked) are poor replacements for a resume sent in by an interested candidate. Had I even considered seeking bloggers for that recent employee search, cold-emailing bloggers to see if they’re interested in a certain job – without an accurate measure of the bloggers’ employment desires or location/relocation plans – would just be a waste of time for any job not paying in the top 2%. And, if a job is paying in the top 2% of all jobs out there – then it stands to reason that there are just two or three A-list bloggers who are worth making egregious offers to.
(Blogger/skill directory anyone?)
Update, 4/20/2006: It looks like someone is already working on a system that could be as extensible enough to provide a skills directory, and more, at ClaimID (found via Cloudalicious, from a search on tagging statistics). ClaimID is the first resource I’ve seen for aggregating and annotating information about someone (although without a way to verify the identities on ClaimID there’s still a question as to the authenticity of the data there). ClaimID should prove useful if people actually adopt it. Personally I think ClaimID and sites like it will just lead to “web tool” overload and prefer the idea of an open protocol for sending/receiving identity or trust info – so that everything can be integrated into whatever tools (Outlook, GMail, WordPress, etc.) or web sites that I do choose to use.
Posted by Mike Bijon March 06, 2006
Garett Rogers of ZDNet confirms that Google GDrive is not a rumor. Despite how tired of hype each new Google product recieves I’m eager to see the front-end of anything Google comes up with. I recently switched jobs and am leading the development of an enterprise-class web app with an AJAX front-end. Having dug through all the GUI javascript I can find – the back-end complexity and front-end simplicity of Google’s AJAX interfaces are amazing. Despite the quality of Google’s code the hype still gets to me, after all what percentage of the free webmail market are they serving? The online drive market isn’t without entrenched competitors either. Of course, all the competitors I’m aware of are missing out on the one feature that could make the service a no-brainer (and beat Microsoft to the same thing in their Windows Live services).
Speaking of competitors to GDrive, remember Xdrive? They survived the 1999 explosion of bloated heads & web companies with a solid subscription product that also works as a simple collaboration tool for remote workers and info-driven consultants who are smart enough not to attach everything to an email (since 2000, I’ve worked with contractors in both groups who have pointed me to files in their Xdrives). …actually I think the Sharepoint collaboration tools in Microsoft’s Office Live would be a booming success if they have as much market penetration as I’ve seen with Xdrive.
Speaking of SharePoint, it’s a solid competitor to the unreleased GDrive itself. Microsoft isn’t in on the game yet, but there are plenty of hosted SharePoint services from 3rd party hosting companies. The Office Live system will also include SharePoint, plus the Office features and online applications should garner enough attention to get SharePoint the attention it’s been lacking for years.
GDrive isn’t without examples to support that a similar Google service would see good usage. The GMailFS is a program that allows access to the already free GMail’s 2+ GB of storage and it’s already popular with the geek-set (especially a few Linux users I know, who enjoy mocking how tedious I find my own SharePoint system). With the GMailFS program installed it’s possible to save files directly to the Gmail maibox almost as easily as saving them to a Windows ‘My Documents’ folder. However, Google must be well aware of the bandwidth problem mentioned by Garett Rogers’ sources though; I know someone who had their GMail account closed down for “abuse of the service” not long after he started using GMailFS.
It’s easy enough for a techie with a server, or ten, to host their own online WebDAV or SharePoint drive. What makes GMailFS so popular is that it’s hosted by a third party on reliable connections and servers – and it’s free. Should Google follow tradition and make GDrive free too then they’re bound to take a good chunk of the market – right up until they have to stop registrations because their servers and, this time, the pipes too are overloaded (ala, the Google Analytics service)
That “Killer” feature:
Truely roaming Windows user profiles. 90% of computer users are on Windows and every one of them that I know has or wants a laptop. As soon as someone gives them the ability to mirror, with limited features depending on connection speed, not only files but their user profile – checkmate to everyone who can’t follow quickly.
Posted by Mike Bijon February 27, 2006
Today Scoble added to the wild speculation about Microsoft’s Origami product by pointing out that Microsoft hasn’t done anything to let its bloggers know about the product release plans and that the product can’t help but fail with expectations getting so out of control. I agree. While “the best companies underpromise and underdeliver” it seems that lately the best bloggers overhype and underreport.
With so little information on Origami available, 99% of what’s cluttering Memeorandum right now is just hype and neither Microsoft-generated buzz nor productive discussion. This is both Microsoft’s fault (like Scoble says, for not better managing their own bloggers and the info-flow) and the fault of some bloggers who turned the conversation from “What is Origami?” to “What would I do if I ran Microsoft?”.
Hopefully someone in Microsoft’s PR department will both read Naked Conversations, within in the next year or three, and realize what a great resource their own already-employed bloggers could be. Unfortunately, they’ll probably badly misinterpret the book and attempt to force their bloggers to either use pre-approved copy or have their posts screened before posting …sometimes I just I love “creatives” and how they do run their corners of the world.
Posted by Mike Bijon February 21, 2006
The GAMEY group of companies – Google, AOL/Amazon, Microsoft, eBay, and Yahoo – have been grouped based on their growth by frequent buyouts and other acquisitions. Recently all of them have been criticized for a lack of creativity and execution ability, both for the strategy of growth by buyout and for building poorly thought products with no clear track to profits. Especially with the enormous prices placed on them, it’s easy to think of Flickr, Picasa, Skype, and Weblogs, Inc. as branded assets that carry “extra” value based on market-share, user count, etc.
I disagree that there are market-cornering strategies and “brand value” behind the new acquisitions and products. The execution behind new products like Google Blog Search and Windows Live Ideas appears to be as much about throwing something new at the wall and seeing if it sticks as it is to complete the master plan of a team of MBA’s. Those business decisions may seem haphazard, but the truth is that the internet and GAMEY in particular are growing up to be more like brick-and-mortar suppliers and less like the razor-focused, genius-run companies they’re often cast as.
I see a close correlation between GAMEY’s recent behavior and the typical behavior of large consumer goods companies. Frequent test products, new brand launches, and acquisitions are typical of packaged consumer goods companies, like Proctor & Gamble and Unilever. Long-standing brands are still used to create a relationship with customers, but they’re extended with new versions, advertising, and a willingness to make false starts. Buyouts even acquire products that compete with existing in-house goods – often to gain production efficiencies (maybe traffic and server efficiencies for GAMEY) and products that appeal to different classes of customers. This comparison makes the reasons Yahoo bought out so many “Web 2.0″ startups, how Google can continue to add new products when current ones aren’t even monetized, and even why Amazon would build its own search engine and a music player & store to compete with the iPod & iTunes seem much less glamorous and a lot more buttoned down.
Mike Bijon: I'm a development manager and technologist for a smart, small marketing strategy company, 
