查看完整版本: This and that, March 18, 2007

This and that, March 18, 2007

Seattle in March is depressing.  There's some occasional sun, still a lot of rain, it's too cold for spring, and the clouds are still way too low.  I was in Palo Alto this past week and it made me want to move back to the bay area.3l"[jY,z[d
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March Madness makes me want to drink beer and eat cheeseburgers and do nothing but watch basketball.  Not good for the gym routine.
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Interesting to see that Mike Arrington has hired Heather Harder to run Tech Crunch.  I sat next to Heather at a dinner this past fall and I was super impressed with her.  Mike has done a great job with the Tech Crunch site over the past couple of years, making it the pulse of startup product development.  What a lot of people don't get is that Mike has really turned himself into one heck of a journalist, driven by Mike's personal passion for great products and for understanding business models.  Will be great to see where Heather and Mike take the site next.  Hopefully this will enable Mike to start having some daylight again.
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Is recruiting.com still adding value?  While recruiting.com has basically been running itself for the past year (with Jason Davis prodding it along), I've recently been putting some though as to where we should take the recruiting.com site next.  Sometimes I look at what's going on over there and think to myself:  Does anyone besides the small number of regular participants really care about this?  (OK, now I thought it out loud, not just to myself).  Would love to get your input.H!K+?y"@7C H p
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Guy Kawasaki has a must read post this week re: "the effort effect."  Guy writes:
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If you manage any people or if you are a parent (which is a form of managing people), drop everything and read The Effort Effect. This is an article about Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck. It examines her thirty-year study of why some some people excel and others don’t. (Hint: the answer is not “God-given talent.”) .x,h8jC(m.pO d
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The article postulates that people have two kinds of mindsets: growth or fixed. People with the growth mindset view life as a series of challenges and opportunities for improving. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are “set” as either good or bad. The issue is that the good ones believe they don’t have to work hard, and the bad ones believe that working hard won’t change anything.
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MaM.`L+aS read on...
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According to Com Score, Jobster was the 15th most visited website in the careers category in the U.S. in February.  That's up from #65 a year ago when we first started tracking it.  Thank you to our users who build the site everyday through your creating content on the site via profiles, job postings, user generated content, career advice, tags, etc.  Your content drives our SEO, which is responsible for nearly all the traffic to our site.  The top players in our space spend a ton of money on traffic acquisition.  If we can continue to grow our traffic without spending globs of money to do so, that could have an interesting impact on industry economics.  p!}9c
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We have some new features launching on March 28th which push us a bit more into the career networking space on Jobster.com.  We've been learning a lot from working with Facebook and we're going to start experimenting with some career-oriented social networking features.  We're going to take baby steps here and follow our users.  What would you like to see?   We're also going to be pushing out a new widget then as well as a redesigned career center on Facebook, based on early user's feedback on that site.0Gz!d&eP$u l,_A

l ~&l7NjI9Bvf,f%Y{ If you don't want to completely waste your day, DO NOT click here to check out twittervision.
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4H ?U v4b9Ao-i~ That's all for now.  Drop me a line if there's something you think we could be doing better.

Don JGo, According to published reports the numbers on Rdc have grown substantially this year. However we have never seen them broken down into Google hits and length of visit which is necessary to tell the full story. Whatever the case it is still the central site in the Recruitosphere.

My bet is that Recruiting.com has many visitors to it from search engines and those people are looking for career information. Another group of people will be recruiters looking for industry information.
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Ck{X4O ^EM Surely the thousands of visitors a day are not bloggers, although we dominate comments.(y e+`9W+I6v?l7Iv8_

:D$DU p`$q\ My opinion is that the site has become more about the personalities and less about the content. There is a lot of really good information provided by direct links to career and business articles and links to bloggers in the career or recruiting fields.
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More focus on the content, less on the personalities. Our blogs already have enough personality that we should not be spilling over to Recruiting.com as much as we are.
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-E)ePn!]z#~ And no, I have no idea how to do this without making some of the personalities angry who are supplying some of the content. \f#Q A6\Txvc4v2A

$L)XFd/j"H;M ht Maybe adding a question box of some sort that allows visitors to ask career or industry related questions. Bloggers can either comment on Recruiting.com or on their own site referring back to Recruiting.com. Or you could assign questions to bloggers who volunteer to participate like the blog swap.
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At least you might get a gauge of what the visitors, non-blogger personalities, are looking for.0fz(?'T4qMpR3Rv*G

s1Q(szG$m yi!z One last thought. I believe the idea that the value of a blog being largely measured by the number of comments left is misplaced, particularly with the career space. Many people are looking for information regarding their particular situation with their set of issues. To leave a comment about their personal situation may feel awkward.
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F9b:{5FE)Hn_ I apologize for the long response but after four days of watching NCAA hoops I have some extra energy.

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