November 29, 2005

New York City in A Hundred Words or Less

(OK, it should say fewer).

I agree with Curbed on this post:

Everything—everything—you need to know about New York City is encapsulated in the above 98 words. Commit to memory; there will be a quiz.

Read the whole thing.

GTD

Great advice on “Getting Things Done”:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

I leave the office each night with a clean Inbox -- you wouldn't believe how liberating that feels. My rule is Delete, Delegate, or Do.

Thanks Jason!

Jason over at Recruiting.com notices the Business 2.0 article on TheLadders.com.

Like a lot of folks, our new business model takes a moment of reflection to fully understand:

I have never been crazy about charging people to help find them jobs but if people have jobs and want to pay a service to keep them abreast of what else is out there, well I guess that's ok. Maybe a system where if you have a job you pay and if you don't have a job, you don't pay.

And we run into this all the time: "Why charge the job-seeker, why not charge the company?"

Well, we tried that model at HotJobs and it works just great for the middle market. The problem is, with $100K+ jobs, everybody wants these jobs. And with the internet, it's awafully easy to actually apply for them on the free job boards. Which means that high-end recruiters get inundated with resumes from dish-washers and inappropriate applicants. And recruiters actually end up hiding these jobs from the job boards (and even, in our research, from their own internal company sites) to avoid this resume spam.

So we charge a reasonable fee ($150 / year) to go out and do the searching for you. We call thousands of recruiters each week, we comb corporate job sites, we look high and low for every $100K+ job we can find.

Now some folks can say that they don't like charging people to help them find a job -- and when it comes to the $5,000 a pop "we'll guarantee we'll find you a job" crew, I couldn't agree more whole-heartedly.

But I think it would be a shame to let the nation's best, most-educated, and most succesful talent, continue to flounder on their own instead of creating a service that provides them in one easy place, access to all of the jobs we can humanly (and technologically) find.

By our calculations, there's $450 billion in job-hunting pain at the executive level each year. If we can help shorten the typical VP job search by just one day, we'll eliminate $3 bn in pain in our country. And for our typical subscriber, that means an extra $700 in their pocket!

All in all, it's a great chance, thanks to the internet, for me and my team of 60 to help the leaders of all the different professions of this country get into their next role in life faster, easier, and with less angst. I sure hope, and I certainly believe, that we're up to the challenge!

November 28, 2005

Sins Against Your Citizens

In my book, it is a special form of vileness that profits from or abuses the privileges of a public position. I'd hope for a specially noxious type of prison for the corrupt and the kleptocrats.

So the news that famously pugnacious Calif. Rep. Duke Cunningham Admits Taking Bribes is particularly hard to stomach:

In court documents, prosecutors said Cunningham admitted receiving at least $2.4 million in bribes paid in a variety of forms, including checks totaling over $1 million, cash, antiques, rugs, furniture, yacht club fees and vacations. Among other things, prosecutors said, Cunningham was given $1.025 million to pay down the mortgage on his Rancho Santa Fe mansion, $13,500 to buy a Rolls-Royce and $2,081 for his daughter's graduation party at a Washington hotel.

Your nation and your fellow citizens give you tremendous power, raise you high on the pedestal, and your reply is to pilfer the piggy bank to pimp your ride?

What a jerk, a criminal, and an embarassment to his family. I hope he gets all ten years in hard labor.

Whiz Kids

Speaking with a reporter today, I was asked what originally got me interested in computers?

It was this cover story in Time Magazine:

From the May 3rd, 1982 issue.

I thought the world they described in the article was fascinating, liberating, would enable you to do things so compelling with the information out there.

So I went to the local Radio Shack every day after school to play with the TRS-80. The guys there, who were extraordinarily nice and patient, taught me BASIC. One of the first full-fledged programs I wrote was a really bad stock market simulation game. But, hey, it was a start!

Looking into the Future of Recruiting

A nice review of the Looking into the Future of Corporate Recruiting panel I was on at Kennedy info, from Peter Clayton at Landed.fm.

Jason Davis' review of the same panel is available here.

I thought my fellow panelists were exceptionally birght and had wonderful insights into where we're headed. Tony Lee has the most perspective of any of us, and Jason Goldberg's energy and vision about changing the employer-candidate dialogue is pretty compelling.

Out with Functional Resumes

I couldn't agree more with Resume Guru Louise Fletcher in her post No Functional Resumes:

A "functional" resume is structured based on skills sets rather than career chronology and it's a favorite tactic for covering up an undesirable background, lack of experience, major gaps in employment, or any other problem.

These resumes are always proferred by resumemongers with some sweet language about how it's a superior ordering of one's actual work experience. Perhaps in theory, though I don't agree, but in practice it's just too hard for a recruiter to get a good read on your life narrative.

Just say "no" to functional resumes.

Thanks Joel

Joel Cheesman notes the story on our business in Business 2.0 and sends kudos. Thanks Joel!

Google

Now worth as much as Yahoo! and eBay combined.

November 23, 2005

Numberspiral

The amazing properties of a NumberSpiral.

November 22, 2005

Match fights back

Match.com Repudiates Baseless Lawsuit is a pretty strong statement from the online personals giant.

We haven't heard from Yahoo! and True, though. Do they, in fact, have their employees e-mail subscribers in an effort to fluff their service?

If so, it would be pretty damaging.

November 20, 2005

Happiness is....

A clean inbox on Sunday night....

I'm outta here!

Who Sold eBay the 25% Craigslist stake?

A friend wanted to know, so I did a little sleuthing:

Craig says on his blog that the person was an executive there in 1999 but later left:

http://www.cnewmark.com/archives/000265.html

The Wayback Machine reveals only 3 people on the About Us page in late 1998:

http://web.archive.org/web/19981201210543/www.craigslist.org/aboutus.htm

A Google Search on Nancy Melone leads to this page:

http://johnsville.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_johnsville_archive.html

Indicating she was forced out in 2000 for $32K. Would she have retained a 25% stake? Unknnown.

And a Google Search on Phillip Knowlton shows him as being identified by the WSJ as the shareholder:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/press/ebay.stake.html

And he remains on the Craigslist About Us page much longer. For example, here he is in December 2002:

http://web.archive.org/web/20021015044310/www.craigslist.org/about/teambios.html

So does a longer tenure make it more likely that he is the fella? Perhaps. And my best bet on the identity of the mystery seller.

Presentations

Awesome post on Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic in presentations.

Coming out of LBO finance, I was definitely a 7 major bullet points and 14 minor points per PowerPoint slide kind of guy. And that presentation style actually served me reasonably well as I was presenting the ideas behind TheLadders.com to VCs and industry people who wanted to know the intricacies of our plan.

But what I've increasingly discovered as I need to explain our business to a wider and wider audience, is that the minutiae of bullet-point-itis frequently ends up obscuring the story, not illuminating it.

It was brought home to me most clearly when I saw Seth Godin speak.

In Seth's entire presentation there were perhaps 4 words on the wordiest slide ("As Seen on TV" if I recall) and none on most of them. He used pictures to tell his story, and because we didnt have to spend half the time reading his slides, his story came across so much more clearly.

Looking back now, I suppose that's the true lesson to be had from the Gettysubrg Address Powerpoint. Let your story tell the story, and don't let the clipped format of bullet point slides hamper it.

Why Are Two Frogs Smarter Than Ticketmaster?

If you've ever tried to buy tickets from Ticketmaster.com you'll appreciate the problems these two frogs are having.

Who is awake at Ticketmaster Product Development?

Tangram Fun

tangram game

Roger Lowenstein on the Google Guys

In "The Story of the Search, Applause Included", the excellent Roger Lowenstein's review of the latest Google book, he nails in one sentence what I think is the essence of the Google trajectory:

Wisdom is often the fruit of failure, and the Google founders have yet to taste any.

Brilliant.

November 19, 2005

Color perception

"This is the most amazing optical effect in the world" says the site and I'd have to agree.

A Day In Search

24 hours in Google Search.

Flickr Color Pickr

Brilliant.

November 15, 2005

The greatest travel story ever

For the best heart-pounding, wrenching, travel story you've ever read, see David Cowan's true story.

Privileged voices in social software

The discussion reminds me of Barry Diller's conversation at Web 2.0 last month.

Barry's a skeptic on user-generated media. He believes (and I think this is almost definitionally true) that talent is not evenly distributed. Some people's talents are greater than others.

[A commenter identifies himself as being from Microsoft, the heads in the room swing around to see.]

Even within a single person, talents are not evenly distributed. Somebody might be more interested in hearing my thoughts on historical linguistics or the online recruitment business, and much less interested in my opinions on professional tennis or the history of haute cuisine.

[Oh my, now we have a four-box grid diagram on the screen. Is there anything at all that can not be better explained by putting it on a Cartesian grid?]

As a result, Barry's view is that there is not great talent out there hoping to self-publish. Great talent is now, and will likely always be, driven towards mass distribution, not the user-generated self-publishing model.

So where, within Social Software, do we find the place to provide privilege, to augment those voices that have something valuable to say and decrement those voices that do not?

[And I agree with Bud that the IRC window live on the screen is very distracting.]

[Tags: CoranteSSA Corante SocialSoftware]

Seth's new company

Root.net is the "first open market for the pricing and exchange of realtime consumer data."

Which is actually a very smart effort to enable the audience to monetize their metadata.

[Tags: CoranteSSA Corante SocialSoftware]

Hanging with the Levellers

My colleagues at the Symposium remind me of the Levellers, the egalitarian faction in the English Civil War.

Hierarchical corporations, prioritization of viewpoints, and providing privilege in the structure of the software to agents that have that privilege in the real world, all seem anathema.

[Tags: CoranteSSA Corante SocialSoftware]

Information Architecture and Attention

It seems to me the challenge of Social Software is to take an enormous, perhaps ultimately infinite, resource -- the information, thoughts, beliefs, insights, and viewpoints of, well, everybody -- and make it useful for a small, finite, resource -- the attention of everybody, measured in hours or, I suppose, with the fractured attention span of the modern human, "focused" hours.

An interesting comment from the audience was that the "I go get" web is turning into a "come to me" web.

And even the "come to me" web is overwhelming, as Fred so poignantly illuminates in this post on the Looming Attention Crisis.

With the amount of attention we have available to "pay" being finite, and presuming the value of the information on the web is not evenly distributed, i.e., some information, viewpoints, and opinions are more valuable than others, how do we properly organize the latter to inform the former?

[Tags: CoranteSSA Corante SocialSoftware]

Is Business Ready for Social Software?

So we seem to have a lot of radicals at the conference. The bad guy at the Symposium seems to be that straw man: The Big Corporation. CEOs are blind, senior management isn't listening, the faceless masses who are tagging, blogging and wiki-fying are the unsung heroes.

Now a lot of that may be true, and big companies do have problems in harnessing the powers of all their people.

So it seems to me that there are two things that we're really talking about: connecting people, and then optimizing the way they work together.

My question is, does Social Software have to achieve both in order to be successful? Or if these are two hard problems, can't Social Software first be successful at connecting people -- even if it is in the old, putatively "bad" model -- and then be successful at optimizing their behavior?

Seth Goldstein has a great quote: "We all work for Google." Meaning that all of the clicks and metadata generated by your activities on Google are really the inventory that Google ultimately sells.

UPDATE: Grant McCracken has an interesting post on the war within the corporation? that highlights the challenge that I think this Symposium faces. We are trying to do two hard things at once: create software that enables community to interact AND change the nature of those interactions. Shouldn't we try to be successful at one first and then try the other?

[Tags: CoranteSSA Corante SocialSoftware]

Corante Social Architecture Symposium

I am at the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture.

Lots of smart people sitting in a big room here at Harvard Law discussing Social Software. I'll be liveblogging.

[Tags: CoranteSSA Corante SocialSoftware]

November 13, 2005

Grid Game

2,646!

Beat that, Kocher!

November 09, 2005

Cool Amazon Stats

Check out "concordance" and "text stats" -- very cool.

Via AndrewKoch.com.

November 08, 2005

Google Maps Risk

An interesting implementation of Risk via Google Maps.

Buffet Speaks

The Oracle does Tuck:

Q: Do you think oil is fairly priced given emerging market growth?

A: It's fairly priced given today's information. In 2004 when oil was at $35/barrel, the 2012 future was at $27. Today the forward curve is flat, the market thinks these prices are here to stay. There are currently 500,000 oil producing wells in the U.S., there isn't any more domestic oil left undiscovered. It takes about one hour of pumping out of a U.S. well to produce enough crude to make enough gasoline to fill the typical 20-gallon gas tank, which takes about a minute to fill up.

Q: What do you think about all the money flowing into private equity and hedge funds? And do you see the future of buying businesses changing based on the considerable increase in private equity activity?

A: I'll tell you what I think of hedge funds. Hedge funds are a huge fad. You can pick any ten hedge funds and I'll bet that on average they will underperform the S&P over the next ten years. You can't create more money out of American business than the business itself creates; so most of these hedge funds will not be able to justify their outlandish fees over the long-term and they will disappear. On Wall Street, there are innovators, imitators, and total incompetents. I'm afraid that the majority of hedge funds around the globe now are run by the latter two categories of people.

As they say, read the whole thing.

November 07, 2005

Weather icons

For some reason, I really enjoyed this page of Weather Icons from around the web.

My favorites were BBC, NYTimes and Meteo.

November 04, 2005

Bloggers blogging quickly

Joel Cheesman over at Cheesman's Online Recruitment Blog has a post on "Job boards behaving badly" that's a little off-base.

Now, I think Joel is just great, and one sharp cookie when it comes to SEO. So I wish he had done a little more research before posting negative stuff about us.

For the record, in order for an employer to use our service, they agree to the following:

"In accepting this Agreement, You also grant TheLadders.com and its affiliates the license to use, reproduce and communicate to the public and display the name and trademark of your organization and your status as a contributor of content to TheLadders.com."

In addition, I've checked with our marketing group and we are not now running any Google ads of the nature he suggests -- in fact, I'd asked about a week ago that we look into it because we're not.

So, legally speaking, Joel's assertions are not true.

But legalism is one thing. How are we doing at TheLadders.com as good neighbors and partners to our hiring companies?

Well, as it's always free to fill your $100K+ jobs at TheLadders.com, I think the price is right :) And we provide hiring firms and recruiters with the highest quality candidates because of the unique messaging, function-specific, and screened quality of our 560,000 subscribers.

So I think we're being a pretty good neighbor, too.

So both legally, and on a "good guy" basis, we're doing our absolute best here at TheLadders.com to help companies fill thier jobs, and I don't think Joel's post treats us fairly.

I'm all in favor of all sorts of different people helping companies fill their positions, but I don't think it's fair to try to build up your own business by (incorrectly) tearing down someone elses. That's just not nice.

So with all that, and knowing that Joel is generally a pretty fair and reasonable guy, I'm hoping he'll correct this misunderstanding on his blog quickly.

November 01, 2005

A dot for every second of the day

A dot for every second in the day - a clock