Food Theft is a CRIME

This little beauty was added to the fridge on my floor at work, and I think it’s just classic. Every day it brings a little sunshine to my day.

So how would it feel, if for your next job, you had to answer that you were let go from your prior job for stolen leftovers…

Job Searching 2.0

As I have been researching job sites for my company as I roll out co-branded versions for some of our pubs, I have come across two job search aggregators.

So I did a bit of comparison to see which was better, on the same search in Hoboken.

Simply Hired

• - First off, they call Hoboken Castle Point
• - 697 matches for a particular search
• + Easy and clear Search Within Results
• + Post resume to multiple sites
• + Salary research linked to posts
• + LinkedIn to hiring companies
• + Drop down info & maps for hiring companies
• + Ability to hide the left nav filters

Indeed

• + 1,233 matches on the same search above
• / Looks like Google, same ads and all
• - No Search Within Results function
• + Records last visit to specific jobs and how often
• + Drop down info, maps, salary, LinkedIn/Ryze
• + Ability to save private notes per posting
• + Lots of search gadgets, widgets and tools for search
• + Ability to hide the left nav filters

Both of the sites offer much improved searching over their 1.0 counterparts. From looking at them both, I favor SimplyHired from an aesthetics perspective, cleaner layout (no ads), and the resume posting. Indeed has more tools but in the end is strictly a search and leads you to the sites where you have to post.

Watching the Road

So would you trust an SEO consultant if he drove like this?

Actually he is pretty good at his “day job” of SEO, though I don’t think I would give him the keys of my car.

Accession Media

August Google Rank – Afterthoughts

So in June I got to the top of Google, but I changed my LinkedIn personal URL to my name and I was wondering how that impacted (which it helped on G while it was already high on Y). I have also been looking to get more backlinks, since that is key to SEO.

August 2006: G, M, and Y at 1.

Keyword: adam karas URL Pattern: adamkaras.com
Google: Position: 1
Yahoo: Position: 1 (my linkedin page)
MSN: Position: 1

Keyword: “adam karas” URL Pattern: adamkaras.com
Google: Position: 1
Yahoo: Position: 1
MSN: Position: 1

Google Page Rank: 2/10
Number of Backlinks: 14

Web Stats Are Broken

Matt Marshall at Siliconbeat wrote that web analytics are broken and are back to square one, talking about third party web traffic measurement.

The only reason the system isn’t breaking down, and advertisers aren’t pulling out, is because they have no choice but to play. They are taking informed guesses, based on the shoddy statistics available. And Google et al. are using every strategy they can find to deal with this problem.

Webanalyticsbook added some graphs and a good summary of the main companies that guess traffic.

Alexa: Alexa data is collected via the Alexa browser toolbar, which is obviously more often installed on tech interested users, than on average Joe’s computer. This means that more tech relevant users on your site increase the chance that your Alexa rank increases. Also software programmes like Alexabooster can easily “boost” your rank . Alexa only gives you an idea or a trend, but will never be accurate.

Comscore: Comscore is based on 2 million participants, which allows them to capture a broad view of surfing and buying behavior. Problem here is pretty much the same. Accuracy won’t be 100% for tech related websites.

Hitwise: Hitwise collects logfile data directly from the ISP networks (network-centric) and does not have a user-centric or site centric approach. They also combine this rich ISP data with a worldwide opt-in panel to overlay demographic, lifestyle and transactional behavior across the thousands of websites that are reported on every day.

Feeds Via IM

Here is another way to get feed updates to you quickly and easily. With FeedCrier, you just need to send an AIM to “feedcrier” with “subscribe [feed url]” and you will get an IM every time there is an update. Very simple and the free version lets you add 3 feeds, or get unlimited for $4/month.

So that means I can do FeedCrier and Kayak via IM.

Get instant messenger update alerts with Feed Crier FREE.

Opt In or Out?

In response to an NYT editorial on stored search, Fred Wilson had a good response regarding Opt In or Opt.

I think we need to think long and hard before moving to an opt-in approach to solving all Internet privacy issues. Sure, we have the right to privacy on the Internet, but if we force users to opt into stored queries, stored behavior, stored logins, etc, it will make the Internet a lot less useful.

Today Amazon is storing our clickstreams on Amazon and using that to create a custom home page where we get really useful purchase recommendations. If that was an opt-in feature, about a tenth of the people who find it useful would actually be using it.

This is something I have deal with a good deal at work, and after much debate we have found that a bold opt-out works best for our business.

Splunkd

In March, a buddy of mine loaded up his PT Wagon and headed west from NYC to SF, and took up work at Splunk.

Splunk basically makes a very good meta-data search tool, for any sort of massive chunck of data. A good example is Splunk’d, their interface to the publically released search data by AOL.

More details from Dana Gardner at ZDNet on AOL Gate, and ComputerWorld has a review that even gets my friend’s name in print.

Thanks to Ben for the details.

eBooks: Hip and Stylish

You can’t get better timing then this. The same day that an eBook gets described as “super duper white paper” by a coworker (instead of the previous “white paper on steroids”), I see this article from MarketingProf: E-books: A Hip and Stylish Younger Sibling to the Nerdy Whitepaper.

So what is an e-book? For the purposes of marketing using web content, I define an e-book as a PDF-formatted document that identifies a market problem and supplies an answer to the problem. The best e-books don’t sell a product; rather, they brand an organization as a thoughtful leader in a defined market space.

I for one work on a fair amount of web-based Flash eBooks, instead of PDFs. But I do like the terminology used to describe them.

First saw this from B2B Lead Generation Blog.

My Cubicle

A rendition of the James Blunt song ‘you are beautiful’, but for the Dilbert crowd.