Tis the season for recruiting

The holidays are upon us. Around the United States this week millions of employees will return home to their families and relatives and be greeted with typical questions about life and the pursuit of happiness. The conversation inevitably turns to work, and causes a self-examination fueled by the best wishes of friends and relatives. Are you happy? How’s your job working out? Are they treating you well? Do you think you will get a raise, bonus, or promotion this year? Have you heard about how John is doing at his job?

The questions raised during the holiday season cause employees to question their current job and wonder whether they can do better. Combined with the debt-heavy spending of December, much of the workforce is primed for a job change.

What is your company or your product group doing to retain talent and take advantage of outside employees now considering a move? Add a few more names to your Christmas card list with best wishes for a fruitful career.

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I’ve been digged

It’s 5 a.m. in San Francisco and the Google/Riya story I blogged about on Wednesday night is currently the #4 story on Digg.com with 313 diggs as I write. My server is still holding up nicely under the load, but since there has been a lot of talk about Digg lately I think it’s interesting to share some stats.

Unlike Slashdot which has posts listed in reverse chronological order, I believe a top digg can rise or fall over time since I am currently #4 on Digg yet the post has more diggs than #2 and #3. I mention the difference because I cannot tell if this traffic is indicative of a #4 spot or if I was #1, #8, #12, etc. before I took a look this morning

Over 2600 visitors from Digg in the last 5 hours. Memeorandum referred about 40 visitors in the last 5 hours by comparison.

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Om and Niall PodSessions #3

I sat down with Om Malik tonight to record the latest of our weekly podcasts. We sat across the table from each other in a quiet room instead of using Gizmo Project and you can tell the difference in the quality of the audio file.

This week’s podcast is 8.9 MB in size and 19 minutes and 15 seconds in length.

We spent most of the podcast talking about startup companies in the Bay Area. Last week Om and I became well aware of the new bubble forming in the valley. I shook my head as I saw two new companies with Google Maps markers in their corporate logo fail to elaborate a business strategy or exit. Many companies seem built-to-flip to Google, Yahoo!, or MSN, and it gets a bit frustrating. On the other hand, I like hearing stories of employees smothered by bureaucracy leaving their small company, creating an innovative solution to the problem, and being bought by the same company. The Robot Co-op is like that, but still able to operate outside of Amazon.

Other topics covered include what Om and I think Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are looking for in a potential acquisition, discussion of previous companies such as Android, MessageCast, Lookout, and Flickr, and current acquisition targets such as Riya.

Next week Om and I will talk about mobile phone hardware and technologies.

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Podzinger podcast search

I just came across Podzinger, a podcast search engine developed by BBN Technologies. BBN Technologies is the same company that developed the first Internet router, sent the first e-mail, pioneered voice over IP, and the TCP, to name a few. They have been working in acoustics and voice recognition for decades, funded by the government’s need to listen to broadcasts from all over the world and transcribe the results.

Podzinger is powered BBN’s AVOKE STX speech recognition technology which adds speaker recognition and confidence level detection to its speech-to-text technologies. The site’s database currently contains a little over 10,000 podcasts but should continue to grow as the site leaves beta. Each search result includes links to the RSS URL, iTunes subscription, and Yahoo! podcast directory entry. You can restrict your search to just one podcast, or view all the information Podzinger knows about the podcast. They even show you the Creative Commons license for the content right in the search results.

Check out a search for iPod or a search for Windows Vista. You can subscribe to any search via RSS.

It seems like the site is definitely indexing show notes since the excerpts don’t appear to be conversational in nature. Looks like a pretty good start, and BBN definitely has the technical chops to make this thing work.

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Google Sitemaps adds search stats

Google added some new features this week to allow webmasters to learn more about what Google knows about their sites. Once you verify ownership of your weblog you can view the top Google search queries displaying your site as well as the top terms generating click-throughs. You can also few statistics such as PageRank distribution across your pages, the amount of content on your site in various formats such as podcasts versus text, and errors encountered by Google’s search crawler when accessing your site.

Check out my Movable Type Sitemap entry if you would like to provide Google with an updated list of your entries. Anyone can signup for Google Sitemaps regardless of whether or not you have submitted a sitemap to Google. Here’s how:

  1. Sign-in to Google Sitemaps using your Google Account.
  2. Add your site.
  3. You will be asked to verify ownership of the site by placing a blank HTML with a unique name of “GOOGLE” followed by 16 characters. A tip for bloggers: if your blogging software allows you to create individual files you can create a new page on your site without knowing anything about FTP. In Movable Type just create a new index with the file name required by Google to view information about your blog URL.
  4. Let Google know the file exists by clicking “Check Status” on the verify page.
  5. You should now have access to your site statistics.

Basic

Query Stats

Google sitemaps query stats

The left column shows the most common search terms that include your site in the result. The right column shows the search terms that resulted in a user clicking through to your site.

Crawl stats

Google sitemaps crawl stats

You can view information about the pages the Google spider has successfully crawled, the total crawl failures, and the pages you have asked not to be included. This is useful quickly grasping how many of your pages are not being found for misconfiguration or by your own will.

On the right you can see the distribution of your site PageRank among high, medium, low, and unassigned values. The higher your PageRank the better but for sites like blogs with a high number of pages I don’t expect many high numbers.

Page Types

You can view the content type distribution of your site’s pages using the Page Analysis section of Google Sitemaps. It’s a good way to gauge how much of your site is comprised of text, images, audio, etc.

Advanced

Advanced users can also check out site errors. You will be able to view links Google followed to your site but found no content, URLs not followed due to nofollow designations, and URLs that timed out when requested by the crawler. This information is useful because visitors may come to your site from somewhere else and reach a dead-end. If you find a lot of HTTP status codes of 404 you should redirect to your content’s new location — a permanent redirect or status 301 — or let others know your content is gone forever with a 410 Gone message.

Revisiting the Google sitemaps page will help you keep your site happy and create the most opportunities for new traffic to your blog or website.

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Google purchasing Riya?

Photo service Riya has been acquired was being acquired by Google for close to $40 million according to sources involved with the company. Riya uses face recognition technology to identify people in photos. The system can also recognize text such as street signs. Google likes using algorithms to solve complex problems, so the acquisition seems like a good fit. Om Malik has done some additional digging on the deal’s details.

Riya has approximately 12 employees in Redwood City and an additional 10 employees in India.

Riya is set to launch this week with a party in Atherton this Friday.

Update 12/24: Google pulled out of the deal during the due due dilligence phase in mid-December. Google had previously demonstrated the research of its Picassa team in photo recognition at the Web 2.0 conference in October and Riya would have worked into an overall recognition and annotation strategy.

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Ray Ozzie is blogging again

Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft and leader of Microsoft’s service business, is now blogging on MSN Spaces. MSN Spaces is one of the many Microsoft services receiving an overhaul as part of Windows Live.

Ray’s former company, Groove, was one of the first companies to introduce a blogging policy. Groove’s policy has guided the policy of other companies in the many years since it was first introduced.

I had to point to a copy of Ray’s previous blog at the Internet Archive because all of his previous blog entries now redirect to his Spaces blog homepage. Please don’t lose the archives Ray!

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Corporate blogs as more than a marketing brochure

Too many corporate marketers see a blog as a marketing brochure to spread the same marketing content in multiple formats. Below are three different areas often overlooked by companies considering blogging as a communications strategy.

Recruitment

Corporate blogs can be a recruiting tool for both active and passive candidates. Job candidates like to know who they will be working with, on what types of projects, and if the company takes good care of its employees. All of this information is best discovered and trusted from individuals within the company.

In a larger company the blogs of individuals can be used to cut past the general job listings and engage market of interest with less options and more in-depth information. When Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software wants to hire new employees he gets the word out on his blog. His thousands of readers already know a bit about his management style, company focus, and product decisions, and Joel usually has a few thousand reasonable applications for each job opening which he can narrow down pretty quickly.

General Sentiment

Imagine if the people behind Google Reader had a blog where they discussed the different product considerations leading to its launch, stress testing for millions of users, and team members’ favorite desktop aggregators. Readers would get a better feel for the product and the goals and objectives of the team behind the product. Learning these types of details causes people to join a product and feel like they own a bit of it instead of just a casual user.

Corporate blogs allow a company to present a destination for timely delivery of news to the community. Where does the blogosphere turn to learn about the problems at your company? Shouldn’t your own blog be one of the sources? When stories of mass hysteria hit the blogosphere I usually look for a voice within the company involved with the cause of the hysteria to present their position or perspective. I think Yahoo! has failed to properly communicate these points during high-profile events such as handling the e-mail of a dead Marine or handing over information about dissidents to the Chinese government.

Blogs and the people identified behind the blogs help create a personal connection in what could be an us vs. them culture.

Extra information

Product pages can become so crammed full of technical specifications and marketing highlights someone’s favorite features might be overlooked. A blog allows fans of the company, or searchers looking for a specific solution, to find your product and learn more about some of the subtleties. Apple’s new photo editing software, Aperture, is undoubtedly crammed with more features than could fit on the website. Customers also have questions about how the software differs from existing products in the space such as iPhoto or Photoshop. A blog enables the team to cover these smaller topics and create fans and buyers where someone might be indecisive. Personal interaction with product lead Joe Smith, a photography geek who has been dreaming of this app for 10 years, will change perceptions and ties to the product in positive ways.

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