Global Nerdy

Those of you who’ve been following my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, might recall a posting from way back in 2004 in which I wrote about my appearance in an article in the Globe and Mail titled Net Diarists Blog Their Way to a Job. The article also covered how the blogs helped the charming, telegenic and tech-savvy Amber Macarthur land her job. For reasons I will never fathom (but for which I am grateful), they used my picture for the article instead of hers.

The general gist of that article from a couple of years ago was that having a blog can help build your presence on the web, which in turn can help get you a job. Today, a ComputerWorld article posted today takes it to the next step: it says that not having a web presence can actually hurt your job search.

In a 2006 survey by executive search firm ExecuNet in Norwalk, Conn., 77 of 100 recruiters said they use search engines to check out job candidates. In a CareerBuilder.com survey of 1,150 hiring managers last year, one in four said they use Internet search engines to research potential employees. One in 10 said they also use social networking sites to screen candidates. In fact, according to Search Engine Watch, there are 25 million to 50 million proper-name searches performed each day.

In today’s job market, turning up missing on the Web may not be a fatal flaw, and it’s probably better than having a search result in a photo of you in a hula skirt. But over time, the lack of a Web presence — particularly for IT professionals — may well turn from a neutral to a negative, says Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc.

“Particularly because we’re a core technology provider, if someone came looking for a senior-level job and had left no mark on the Internet, I’d see that as a big negative,” he says.

The article provides these tips for boosting your presence on the web:

1. Know where people look. Do a “vanity search” on your name on search engines and blog search tools like Technorati. See what the first three to five pages of results have to say about you.
2. Start a blog. Blogs, when used well are SEO goldmines as they often are:
   • Heavy on the text
   • Rich in links
   • Updated often
   • Well-formatted (from an HTML point of view)
3. Join the open source community.
4. Build a web page.
5. Create a web profile.

Andy Beal added another four tips to the list:

1. Buy your domain name. “Even if you don’t do a lot with it, you should own a domain name that matches (as close as possible) your name. Your online brand is important, and guess what, despite how many employers you may ultimately have, you’ll likely keep that same name for life!”
2. Understand your Google profile. “Most potential employers are going to use Google, so you may as well focus on the search results there. What’s being said about you, what pages are indexed? Don’t just look at stuff that is about you, look at listings that are about someone with the same name, yet maybe negative. You should be prepared to explain that the person convicted for 3 counts of armed robbery, is not actually you.”
3. Own your brand. “When someone searches for your name, you should try and make sure you have as much control over what they see, as possible. Set up a Flickr account, LinkedIn profile, blog, user-group profile, etc.”
4. Destroy the evidence. Ok, so while most stuff you put online is there for eternity, that doesn’t mean you can’t try some damage control. “That blog post you uploaded – the one where you went on an all night drinking binge and broke into the local Krispy Kreme – remove it! While it may still exist somewhere on the web, it is less likely to show up in the Google search results, if you’ve removed it from your own blog/social network.”

Andy also points to an article of his from last year that might come in handy: Online Reputation Monitoring & Management Beginners Guide.

A couple of recent articles — Mike Arrington’s Print Media Demise, Cont. and Susan Mernit’s recent blog post, The pile on to declare print (newspapers) dead, reminded me of a story I recently heard from my friend Chandra, who teaches what you might call an “English for business” course at a community college in Toronto.

She posed this question to her class: “Suppose your company was facing some negative publicity in the papers. What would you do?”

Here students that there’d be nothing to worry about. The general gist was that nobody gets their news from newspapers anymore.

She then changed her question slightly. “Okay then,” she said, “what if the bad publicity came from blogs?”

The response this time was different. Bad press in the blogosphere? Okay, now you’ve given us something to worry about.

Over at the Tucows Blog, there’s a new article by Tucows CEO Elliot Noss titled Questions to Ask Before You Pick Your Domain Name Registrar. Here are the questions, each of which Elliot goes into further detail:

1. What is the registrar’s primary business model?
2. Does the registrar make transfers as easy as the rules allow?
3. Do you allow for easy locking and unlocking of domain names?
4. Does the registrar make it easy to opt-out of auto-renewals?
5. Do the registrar tie domains to its services?
6. Does the registrar offer Whois privacy? What are its privacy policies in general?
7. What are the registrar’s policies on compliance issues like litigation, ownership disputes and WDRP?
8. How easy is it to contact the registrar?
9. What happens when my domain expires?
10. Are the people selling you your domain name a registrar or a reseller?

If you’re thinking about registering a domain name anytime soon, this article is a worthwhile read.

Some of the terms and concepts covered in the article might be unfamiliar to you, but worry not: this week, I plan to write some articles explaining some of them. I hope that this will clear up some of the confusion about domain name registration.

One more thing: in the interest of full disclosure, I work for Tucows, a company that is a domain name registrar and for which Elliot Noss is the CEO.

Hey, other tech news sites.

We understand the internet ecosystem — borrow a little from this site, grab an image from that site, quote and link to a couple of blog articles — and we think it’s all good.

We notice that in the rush to write articles about “Clown Co.” — you know, the partnership between News Corporation and NBC Universal to create a “YouTube killer” — that while references to Google’s coining the name for the partnership abound, there is a paucity of actual clown images being used in the stories, even in tech news sites known for their snark and smart-assery (Valleywag, we’re lookin’ right atcha).

Because we at Global Nerdy live to serve, we hereby provide this image for you to use in your articles. It features Insane Clown Posse, a ridiculous hip-hop band with a follwoing among “the kids”. There are some similarities between ICP (as the band is often called) and Clown Co.: it’s a partnership of two, both ventures are kind of hard to explain, and hey, we felt like poking fun at them. Here’s the pic:

Feel free to use it wherever you like — just credit Global Nerdy, okay?

Don’t say we never did nuthin’ for ya.

As George mentioned in his earlier posting, “Clown Co.” is Google’s internal nickname for the joint venture by News Corporation and NBC Universal to create a competitor to YouTube. The name’s catching on; Michael Arrington uses it in his latest TechCrunch piece titled Dear Clown Co.: Name This Thing Fast Before Its Too Late. I have a hunch that it’s already too late, a fact that will annoy both NewsCorp/NBCU partners (and possibly the company whose actual name is Clown Co).

In his article, Arrington lists a number of red flags that came up during Clown Co.’s media/analyst call featuring NewsCorp CEO Peter Chernin and NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker:

Isn’t that just like a clown: bringing a TV to an internet fight. The two key messages being pushed by Clown Chernin and Clown Zucker were “respecting copyright” and “creating the largest advertising platform on earth”. Arrington nails it with his comment: “That may be good messaging to stockholders, but it isn’t what the public cares about.”

Why would I want to watch TV when I can watch it smaller and blurrier? I wish that line was mine, but it’s from last night’s Daily Show segment on YouTube and Viacom. It may have been a joke for John Stewart, but it actually sounds like Clown Co.’s strategy. They made almost no mention of user experience, save for “we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”, which suggests that they have no idea why YouTube is so popular.

Maybe they’re scared of clowns. Only two networks signed up, and Viacom didn’t join in.

These clowns don’t know what they’re getting into. YouTube, now with added Google, have the experience and infrastructure to run web apps that are simple enough to get out of the user’s way and powerful enough to be useful and compelling.

These clowns have history working against them. Valleywag brought up the case of MusicNet, the BMG/EMI/Sony alliance that was formed to take on Napster and eventually became a flop that was named by PC World as one of the worst tech products of all time.

Even vaporware has names! By not giving even an interim codename to their already vague and amorphous project, they made their project hard to talk about and left the door open for anyone to stick it with a moniker that they’ll be stuck with. Letting their Google/YouTube competitors do that was even worse. To borrow a line from the Bart Gets an Elephant episode of the NewsCorp property The Simpsons, “How about those clowns at Clown Co.? what a bunch of clowns.”

This San Jose Mercury News piece makes me wonder if they’re looking for a tech evangelist…

When it comes to vacation, Netflix has a simple policy: take as much as you’d like. Just make sure your work is done.

Employees at the online movie retailer often leave for three, four, even five weeks at a time and never clock in or out. Vacation limits and face-time requirements, says Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings, are “a relic of the industrial age.”

“The worst thing is for a manager to come in and tell me: `Let’s give Susie a huge raise because she’s always in the office.’ What do I care? I want managers to come to me and say: `Let’s give a really big raise to Sally because she’s getting a lot done’ – not because she’s chained to her desk.”

[via my cousin Rafy]