WordPress.com

WordPress.com is a new hosted version of the popular open-source software WordPress. WordPress.com builds upon the WordPress 1.6 codebase including new support for multiple users named WordPress MU to describe its multi-user capabilities.

Developer Donncha O’Caoimh has been busy adding new multi-user capabilities to WordPress. WordPress MU features improved user management, categories shared across an entire install, and a redesigned drag-and-drop editing interface.

Bloggers will soon be able to signup for their own hosted WordPress installation at WordPress.com but until then the service is invitation only while hardware comes online and everything is properly configured. If you would like to experiment with WordPress.com’s hosted WordPress solution just let me know and you might just receive an invite from the WordPress.com pimp.

Bay Area Technology Jobs Blog

I created a new weblog focused on technology jobs in the San Francisco Bay area. The process of potential employees with potential hirers seems so inefficient I just had to try to better connect the two sides. The economy is improving and there are many interesting jobs available at technology companies building cool new things that push the boundaries of conventional wisdom, behavior, and code.

The new weblog provides a way for me to experiment with various forms of advertising, connect people, a provide a pulse on industry employment movements to all who are interested. I am currently using FeedBurner TotalStats Pro to experiment with feed analytics and I am hand-selecting books sold by Amazon.com to accompany each entry. I post each entry without influence from recruitment or referral fees, if they exist. I only post about specific positions — no generic or broad listings — I think are of interest to people working on the latest technology, with a definite slant towards startups and small businesses.

Interesting findings

I have been surprised at the current lack of effort by corporate websites to attract new employees.

  • Some startup companies such as Socialtext and JotSpot are hiring but provide only a “jobs@” e-mail address for inquiries. Joe Kraus complains about Google sucking up engineering talent but at least Google has a jobs page. I need to do extra work to include these companies.
  • Some companies have had the same job posting(s) on their site for months. Six Apart has been looking for a Director of Operations and Mobile Product Manager since the beginning of the year. When I see such dated postings I wonder if the company is serious about filling the position and skip them.

I do not have a scientific process for listing jobs on the TechJobsBlog, but I will try to keep it updated with whatever I come across and seek out new sources of information.

Tags: ,

Signs you should consider replacing your company

Brad Feld’s recent post about signs a board of directors should replace the company’s CEO got me thinking about a larger issue. Why not apply the same problems to a worker’s role in the company? The main difference is the middle manager or line worker usually has less money and capital invested in the success of the enterprise but many of the same ideas hold true. The list below is modified from Brad’s post to focus on the role of an individual worker.

Signs you should consider replacing your company

  1. I never hear from my commanding officer (other than at interdepartmental meetings) except after I initiate the contact.
  2. All communications from my commanding officer are “sales pitches.” If all the news is good, I know something is wrong. If all communications are “presentations” (instead of interactions), something is wrong. The corollary to this is when important news, good news or bad news, usually comes from a back channel such as other employees informing me of a change in my department or responsibilities or when you first hear the news from someone outside the company.
  3. Corporate or departmental failures always turn into “learning experiences.” The deals you are told are about to happen, or the corporate and departmental initiatives that never came to fruition, become learning experiences or the result of changed corporate goals and initiatives. Mistakes happen and are usually learned from, but repeated mistakes in any walk of life are a bad sign.
  4. There is a revolving door at any level. I am suspicious when there are many people leaving a department, especially after workers within the company know the employee had not been happy in his or her role for a while. Was the departure avoidable? It is not common to hear management remark that the person left the company for personal reasons or aspirations, yet the corporate message is usually “it is actually good this person is leaving as she wasn’t very effective in her role.” A related issue is when the founder or CEO frequently blames or complains about a department or its actions yet hangs on to the responsible persons because they do not want to deal with the knowledge transfer and replacement process or take steps to improve that individual’s effectiveness within the company.

Additional signs of planning trouble

  1. Not facing planning reality. A strategic product is behind schedule, there are no clear plans to rectify and adjust, and no one is really sure why.
  2. Corporate management starts coming up with deals that make no sense but have big names or big promised numbers.
  3. Pandering to the founder/CEO/board. Staff takes every request or idea from every board member, advisor, founder, or CEO and immediately integrates the idea into a product roadmap. Big trouble if the ideas bypass product teams completely.

Tags: , ,

Time wasting at work

According to a new survey of 10,000 workers by America Online and Salary.com the average worker in the Software and Internet sectors admits to wasting 2.2 hours per work day. Human resource managers admitted to an assumed loss of 0.94 hours per work day and a suspected loss of 1.6 hours per workday. The top reasons employees provided were not having enough work to do (33.2%), feeling they were underpaid for the amount of work they perform (23.4%), distractions from co-workers (14.7%), and not enough personal time after-work (12%).

I think the top two cited work hinderances are actually related: not having enough work to do and feeling the work they do is undervalued. That means that there is a big opportunity to increase downtime with a well-communicated incentive and advancement program and the ability to be an agile business rewarding employees for being self-starters.

Google and Yahoo! are often cited as companies enabling their employees to work on cool new projects a few hours a week. Google refers to its program as “20% time” while Yahoo! calls it “Friday fun” and I will simply refer to it as time set aside for side projects. Assuming a 50 hour work week each program enables 10 hours a week of acceptable employee sidetracking. Any employee working on something other than his or her immediate job duties might be seen as researching a side project, or taking away from their own personal project through this extraneous work. I believe the creation of such acceptable side projects empowers the individual employee to take more personal responsibility for his or her time on the job.

The San Francisco Bay Area is a bit different than most places, but many people I know are involved in side projects outside of the workplace.

The history of Labor Day

Today is Labor Day. A day for every man and woman in the United States to take some time off, sip some ice tea, and spend time with friends and family. The tradition began with coordinated unpaid day off of work and became a part of the national scene under political pressure and a mid-term election in 1894.

The work environment of the late 19th century heavily favored the employer. The Pullman Palace Car Company company was one example of a company where you assumed not just a job, but a lifestyle. Founder and CEO George Pullman created the town of Pullman in Illinois, the first planned industrial town in the country, in what is now south Chicago. All residents of Pullman, Illinois worked for the Pullman company, had their paychecks deposited into the Pullman bank, bought goods only from Pullman-owned stores, and had their rent for their Pullman-owned homes automatically deducted from their weekly paychecks. Assembly and craft workers lived in row houses, managers lived in Victorians, and George Pullman lived in the penthouse of a luxury hotel created for visiting customers, suppliers, and salesmen. The depression of the early 1890s popped the railroad bubble and a quarter of the railroad companies in the United States went bankrupt. The Pullman company was forces to layoff hundreds of employees and cut wages for the remaining employees but the company did not adjust its rent for company-owned housing or product prices at company-owned stores in correlation with the local and national depression. Employees walked out, and people across the nation boycotted riding trains with Pullman cars, led by the efforts of Eugene Debs at the American Railway Union and sympathy strikes across the country. 12,000 federal troops were sent in to contain the 50,000 striking workers, troops fired on protesters, union organizers were arrested, and mayhem erupted.

The Pullman strike occurred two years after Irishman Hugh O’Donnell led a strike at Carnegie Steel Works’ Homestead plant. Management at Carnegie Steel hired a private police force of Pinkerton detectives and closed the mill, locking out 3,800 existing workers while hiring new workers at lower wages, and imposed 12-hour workdays.

The Knights of Labor, a labor union with a national agenda at the time, had a convention and a parade in New York City on the first weekend of September. Many workers would take an unpaid day off work the first Monday of September and march for labor rights and declare their sympathy for the efforts of the Knights of Labor. Irishman Matthew Maguire organized a campaign for a national labor day, taking advantage of the hot mid-term political elections of 1894. President Grover Cleveland of the Democratic party created Labor Day in an attempt to reconcile his actions and win favor for his party.

It took a lot of effort and events to create a national holiday for the average worker. I hope you are enjoying your day off from work.

Tags: ,

Updated Hurricane Katrina page on Technorati

Yesterday afternoon I updated the Hurricane Katrina page on Technorati with new first-person reports and information resources about the hurricane and its aftermath.

The original featured content from Monday focused on the latest news about the hurricane and it’s immediate impact. There were links to weather sites such as NOAA and first-hand accounts from people who had been in the middle of the winds and rains that tore through southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. Many people updated their blogs with the latest news, accounts, and general observations from their immediate geographic area. Commenters provided advice from tornado and hurricane affected areas such as Kansas and Florida to individuals blogging the storm to help them make it through the scary experience.

Four days later there was a much different focus. The city was flooded, people were stranded, martial law had been declared, and there was a feeling of distrust of almost anyone as stores and homes alike were looted and there were reports of rape and murder with no consequence.

It was difficult to choose what types of first-person accounts to highlight on Technorati’s sidebar. I read first-hand accounts of people returning to their homes with dead bodies on their front lawn and young girls raped and left to die under an overpass. I read about people loading a car with what they had and driving hundreds of miles away, selling some of their remaining possessions along the way to pay for gasoline. I decided to highlight people’s reflections on the incident, both positive and negative, because I felt these accounts of the disaster were identifiable to all individuals who could easily see themselves in a similar situation and undoubtedly have questioned how they would react and if they are properly prepared to take care of their loved ones in the face of disaster.

On Sunday night I estimated the average cost-per-click of the keyword terms Technorati planned to use on its Katrina page. The average cost-per-click for the terms hurricane, hurricanes, Katrina, New Orleans, and NOAA was $1.24 on Sunday night according to the Google AdWords traffic estimator. The same set of terms currently has an average cost-per-click of $1.91 today, a 54% increase in less than five days. Technorati decided to not place ads on the Katrina page, but it’s interesting to watch the change in numbers.

The story of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is still unfolding. I will continue to observe and reflect.

Tags:

The Onion on Google

The Onion posted an article on Wednesday about Google’s plans for world domination. In the Onion’s satirical account Google will index all of the world’s information by destroying anything it cannot index. The Onion also speculates about Google Sound, a global network of microphones to index the world’s emitted sounds, and Google’s vast army of laser-equipped robots that will scan the DNA of every living organism. (via Doc Searls)

Tags:

Technorati Blog Finder

Technorati just introduced Technorati Blog Finder, a browsable and searchable directory of blogs powered by tags. The Technorati Blog Finder helps you find blogs of interest in the subject areas you care about.

Technorati Blog Finder

The Technorati Blog Finder is a product created with a lot of user feedback about what groups they identify with online and how they would like to find other bloggers within that interest. Technorati seeded the list using a blogger’s most common post tags but authors can edit, change, or delete these tags — up to 20 total — through their Technorati member account page. You can also add blog-level tags in your HTML, RSS feed, or Atom feed.

  1. Add a link to your blog homepage with a link attribute of rel and a “tag directory” value.
  2. Add a category or Dublin Core subject (dc:subject element to your RSS feed at the channel or feed level.

I went through the data last night and added a few blog tags for bloggers in my feed aggregator I wanted to be sure were represented in certain categories. Take a look at the BlogHer blog tag for a listing of organizers and advisors of the recent blogging conference for women. I also tagged blogs with founder or lead developer to designate weblogs written by a project or company founder or lead developer respectively. You can also browse groups of bloggers such as venture capitalists.

Blog tags are also a good way to organize an event. The PDC tag could be used as a bottom-up listing of all of the bloggers writing about or attending Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles later this month.

Technorati Blog Finder helps authors better define how they would like to be discovered and helps readers discover new sources. Pretty cool!

MSN Search quietly introduces feed search

MSN Search introduced feed-specific search last week using two new search operators for advanced users: feed and hasfeed.

You may now restrict your search to only return results from the content of a RSS or Atom feed using the feed search operator. Here is an example MSN feed search for Niall Kennedy.

You may also restrict your search to only include HTML pages with a declared RSS or Atom link alternate. Here is an example MSN feed search for Niall Kennedy on pages with a RSS or an Atom feed.

These two operators pave the way for MSN to introduce search for users with the specific intent of discovering content sources for subscription. The value of feed-specific search for general content discovery depends on the total number of available feeds and the type of content they produced. We have search operators for specific filetypes such as images, PowerPoint, PDF, etc. but most people are looking at feed search as something new and revolutionary due to the emergence of a new content transport. MSN and Yahoo! will both show us their view of the world of feed search and allow me to reevaluate my thoughts soon enough.

Tags: , ,

Shopping comparison questions answered

I recently received a couple inquiries from people interested in the shopping comparison industry for academic studies as well as new business development. I decided to make the answers to some questions and the discussion around the industry an open conversation not constrained to e-mail. I hope you find the information below useful insight into the shopping comparison industry. The text in blockquotes contains questions sent to me via e-mail from a MBA student at the University of Maryland regarding large shopping comparison sites Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and NexTag and the industry as a whole.

Competitive advantage: My observation is, to a large extent, most comparison shopping bots provide similar information. How do the different players develop competitive advantage over others?

The first metric is the breadth of merchants offered at each site. Is a visitor confident their purchase is at a low price from a reputable merchant? In the early days, 1998-2000, shopping comparison sites competed against sites such as PriceWatch that searched all merchants regardless of reputation and the ability to deliver on an advertised price. This frustration led to the introduction of such shopping comparison features as tax and shipping calculations on the product page, and merchant review pages to report companies that would advertise $5 shipping for a stick of RAM and charge $20.

Even if every shopping comparison site was a white-label of the exact same backend with the same features they would be able to differentiate themselves based on their approach to search results, inbound traffic acquisition, cobrands, and targeting audiences of lifestyle sites.

Service offering: Comparison shopping bots are making choices in presentation of information. For example: PriceGrabber shows all the merchants that provide the product and their prices while Shopping.com shows only a few - Is this for differentiation?

Each site varies their search results based on a number of criteria such as cost-per-click or cost-per-lead paid by the merchant, premium merchant programs such as a logo or premiums such as a site certification, and user-contributed data such as reviews, click-through rates, and completed purchases.

A shopping comparison site is a targeted advertising platform for participating merchants. The goal of the comparison site is simply arbitrage: receive a higher average payment for each outbound than your cost for an inbound. Reducing the number of merchants displayed on a page and selling that placement for 4 times the cost-per-click of a full offering allows for higher profits and/or more effort applied to inbound traffic for the comparison site.

Service offering: On several occasions, PriceGrabber lists coupons along with other information while NexTag and Shopping.com do not. Why is PriceGrabber able to provide such valuable information while others are not? Can they not replicate it as it is difficult or are there other reasons.

PriceGrabber has offered rebate information on product pages for over 5 years. We found that rebate information would circulate on message boards and coupon sites and were a main driver of product popularity and increased completed sales from merchants. Rebates come with a lot of conditions such as date ranges, and in some cases are restricted to only authorized brand resellers and can be a customer service pain for many sites. You also need strong database normalization to achieve good matches between your own database and an external data provider such as a rebate company. Most buyers will factor a rebate’s savings into the total cost of the item but I remember reading statistics years ago that only 10% of all rebates involving cutting a UPC are ever redeemed, but the rate increases to about 30% when an item is free after rebate. If the buyer does not receive their rebate will they feel deceived by the manufacturer or the shopping comparison site that heavily influenced their shopping decision?

Industry evolution: PriceGrabber recently introduced travel service while NexTag introduced mortgage. Do you think this is a classic struggle between more generalization versus specialization? What are your thoughts on how the industry and services are evolving.

Mortgage and travel categories are two examples of shopping comparison sites offering both product and service shopping comparison in an attempt to be a one stop shop for buyers. Mortgage and travel are search verticals with an extremely high payment for every lead. Advertisers are currently paying Google an average cost per click of $36 to advertise on search result pages for the term “refinance.” Imagine how that number increases when you provide an advertiser with additional information such as property location, loan amount, yearly income, property value, and an e-mail address. The average $36 a lender is paying to Google for a user clicking on a text ad is worth a lot more to a lender with this additional information and NexTag submits a loan lead to 4 lenders at once. Lead generation in the service sector is definitely a lucrative business.

The service industry requires licenses in each state before a site such as NexTag or PriceGrabber can offer comparison services. These legal hurdles take some time to get right, and I expect many shopping comparison sites are simply waiting for the right paperwork to be approved before introducing their services.

Ultimately these sites will follow sectors with the highest payment per lead with minimal costs in their attempt to optimize the arbitrage game of comparison shopping.

Tags: , , ,