Technology and Society - 8. page

Here’s a nice flash presentation showing many of the in jokes of the internet (in anecdotes? in content? whatever it is, if you know these ‘people’, you’ve spent some time surfing online, mostly around video content). It’s a nice trip down memory lane, or a jumping off place if you want to ‘investigate’ more.

I’ve thought for a long time that venues should publish event information in a more computer friendly format. I’m not alone. At barcamp a few months ago, Tom Tromey mentioned the same idea. I believe he’s approached KGNU, but I don’t see any evidence that the concert calendar is available via ICal or RSS.

Making your event information computer parseable allows people to access your event information data and use it in different forms. The win is big for event venues because, unlike some other data providers (like magazines), the business model is robust and built in–people buying tickets to a show. Event venues should want their calendar data spread far and wide!

Since I’ve started using Thurnderbird and in particular the Lightning plugin, I’ve been loving the calendar. I used to have a paper calendar that would be occasionally updated. But since I’m in front of my email all the time, I can use Lightning for todos, reminders and sundry other items that would have ended up on a note card or back of an envelope before.

That’s why I’m making the Film On The Rocks ICal file available–purely for selfish reasons. If you’ve never been to Film On The Rocks, it’s a good time.

If you are a event venue and would like advice on making your events even more noticable, feel free to contact me. If you’ve got your events in a database of almost any kind, it shouldn’t be hard to do.
[tags]film on the rocks,red rocks, events, ical[/tags]

There’s a fantastic paper up on First Monday, an online journal I’ve written about before, “Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites”. It’s an interesting look at how social networking sites affect and are affected by their users. I’ve touch on this before in “Will you be my Friendster”.

Some interesting quotes from the paper:

Investigating Friendship in LiveJournal, Kate Raynes-Goldie and Fono (2005) found that there was tremendous inconsistency in why people Friended others. They primarily found that Friendship stood for: content, offline facilitator, online community, trust, courtesy, declaration, or nothing.

Or nothing! I wonder if this applies to business networking sites such as Linked In?

Talking about the early users:

Much to the chagrin of the developers, the early adopters of Friendster framed the social norms, not the system’s designers. Taking advantage of the technological affordances, early adopters used the site to meet their needs. In turn, because of the networked structure of Friendster, they passed on their norms to their friends. Their Profiles signaled what type of people belonged and their communication practices conveyed what types of behavior one could expect.

See Social Software and the Politics of Groups for more on how groups bend social software as they wish.

And from the conclusion:

Part of what makes the negotiation of Friendship on social network sites tricky is that it’s deeply connected to participant’s offline social life. Their choice of Friends online is not a set of arbitrary personal decisions; each choice has the potential to complicate relationships with friends, colleagues, schoolmates, and lovers. Social network sites are not digital spaces disconnected from other social venues — it is a modeling of one aspect of participants’ social worlds and that model is evaluated in other social contexts. In thinking about Friendship practices on social network sites, it is crucial to evaluate them on their own terms, recognizing the role of technology and social navigation rather than simply viewing them as an extension of offline friendship.

The paper is long but well worth a read.

[tags]social networks, friendster,myspace[/tags]

The Economist imagines the pre-flight spiel of a truly honest airline. There’s a lot of scope for increased truthfulness in airline’s interactions with us–including why photo id/ticket matches are useless (seriously) and what oxygen masks are really for (in jest).

[tags]airlines,security,honesty[/tags]

Joel, of Joel On Software fame, has created a jobs board with some rather different rules for posting: no hidden company names (no ‘anonymous jobs’) and a money back guarentee. The main goal is to make a niche job board where folks from the JoS community can find jobs at good companies. Requiring company names also screens out many recruiters.

I think intermediaries in the hiring process can provide high value (I love reading the insights of Nick Corcodilos’ “Ask The Headhunter”). I’ve gotten contracts through recruiters before. Such recruiters can add value by screening candidates and pulling from a wider pool than a company might have available. It’s outsourced HR.

However, I have a resume on Monster. Often, I’ll get an email from a recruiter about a job that is obviously a wrong fit. For example, I have some ATG Dynamo experience and some StoryServer experience, both from several years ago. I’ve received emails detailing jobs where extensive experience with the latest version of ATG Dynamo or StoryServer is required. If the emailer had bothered to read my resume after the keyword match, they’d know I was not a good fit. It is job spam. I’ve hidden my resume on Monster, which helps, but before I did so, my email was sucked into the recruiter databases.

Now, you may be saying “Boo-hoo, Dan! You’re being offered jobs that aren’t a good fit. Just delete the emails!” It’s true, I can treat those emails like any other spam. And the costs are the same as any other spam–my attention. (Occasionally it’s useful to see what positions and technologies are being recruited for, which keeps me from sending all the job spam directly to the trash). The business model for these recruiters is also the same–send out enormous quantities of (nearly costless) email and play the numbers. Employees do this kind of thing all the time when they send out massive numbers of resumes, and it’s broken.

Back to Joel’s jobs board. After a few days, someone violated the no ‘anonymous jobs’ rule, and Joel’s request for suggsions on how to deal with it sparked this discussion, which is pretty lively. Pretty much everyone fell into two categories: don’t allow ‘anonymous jobs’ lest you become another Monster.com, or allow the recruiters, but make anyone submitting an anonymous job check a box, and let users hide such entries. Some folks also suggested charging recruiters more (sometimes much more) than companies, or creating a job board just for recruiters, or creating some kind of rating system which will let ‘good’ employers (whatever that means) float to the top of listings. It does look like Joel has decided to keep the ‘no anonymous jobs’ rule. The JoS job board is now an intermediary, even though it provides nothing more than aggregation and a bit of screening.

I said before that intermediaries in hiring process can have value. I believe this is true of any intermediary in any process, whether it be job board, recruiter, real estate agent, car salesman, travel agent or anything else. But (cue Jaws Theme) disintermediation due to decreased information distribution costs means intermediaries can no longer add value just by having access to information (whether it be MLS listings or phone numbers for hotels in Australia). Now they need to provide something beyond what the internet can provide, whether that be deep experience in a particular city’s real estate or a good relationship with a hiring manager or aggregation of interesting eyeballs.

(“And that’s something that job spammers simply cannot provide.” Well, that was my last sentence until I re-read my post. But job spammers do actually aggregate interesting eyeballs; they just do it inefficiently.)

[tags]joel on software, job boards, recruiters, disintermediation[/tags]