LinkedIn Releases “Apply with LinkedIn” Button
July 26, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Since its big debut as a publicly traded company, news from LinkedIn has been on the wane. Luckily, this week, signs of life not having to do with the most current stock price finally surfaced: LinkedIn has a new button, and true to its careerist commitments, the button will provide an exceptionally simple way for LinkedIn-sters to apply for work. All they’ll need to do to apply will be to press a button. The button’s name is “Apply with LinkedIn.”
Companies that are hiring will now be able to place the “Apply with LinkedIn” button and through that, job applicants can submit their LinkedIn profile information. Netflix and Photobucket are two companies that are using the button as a recruiting tool. The more senior “Apply Now” button at LinkedIn will remain in use. Job seekers will certainly appreciate the new feature’s directness and ease of use. They’ll also be glad to know that even after pressing the “Apply with LinkedIn” button, they’ll still be able to make any last-minute, necessary changes to any part of their profile before submitting their application.
Media commentators are regarding the new button as a manifestation of LinkedIn’s desires to branch out further into the common web, and to not be so circumscribed to the boundaries of its own website.
Read More:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=14155424
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/07/linkedin-apply-job-button.html
Social Media Intelligence Offers Employers A Way to Side-Step Discrimination Suits
July 21, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Social Intelligence has only been in business for one year but already it’s set to make a big impact on the ways that employers screen prospective hires through the use of social media. Googling a job applicant can upend an employer’s best intentions to perform a thorough and fair job screening because online searches can easily reveal details that are legally prohibited from being asked during an interview — facts about an applicant’s religion, sexual orientation, race, age, gender, or disability. Conducting online research that discloses sensitive information can leave employers vulnerable to discrimination suits.
On the other hand, not conducting an online search leaves undesirable and, quite importantly, legally knowable characteristics about an applicant undiscovered until it’s too late. In its website, Social Intelligence says that its company tracks down pertinent information on job candidates, like public postings on social media sites of “racist remarks or activities, sexually explicit photos or videos, and illegal activity such as drug use,” in addition to those of “charitable or volunteer efforts, participation in industry blogs, and external recognition.” The company’s gambit is to conduct meticulous online investigations on job applicants but only pass on to client-employers information that is legally safe for them to have. According to Social Intelligence, this is an all-around win-win situation.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s outreach manager, Joe Bontke, spoke with the New York Times and told the paper that violating antidiscrimination laws was a real risk for employers. He also gave the folks there two figures: 75 percent of American recruiters conduct mandatory online investigations on applicants and 70 percent of them report having snubbed applicants because of the information gathered through those investigations.
Read More:
http://www.socialintelligencehr.com/home
Quepasa Pays Myyearbook $100 Million in Merger Agreement
July 20, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Quepasa, the social network with its sights firmly set on a Latino audience has just paid the sibling trio from New Jersey, Geoff, Catherine, and David Cook, $100 million for their fraternal creation, Myyearbook.com. The payoff is considered part of a merger agreement between the two companies.
Accordingly, Quepasa is putting up $82 million in stock and $18 million en efectivo (cash, guys). The siblings’ social network is geared at teens and has a strong focus on games. Calling it like it sees it, comScore ranks the New Jersey group’s site as the most heavily visited online place for teenagers. For its part, Quepasa calls West Palm Beach, Florida home and was founded in 1997 by Jeffery Peterson; its current CEO is John Abbott.
AllthingsD is reporting that last year the combined revenue of the merging companies came to a grand total of $33.6 million. As part of the deal underway, Geoff Cook, Myyearbook’s CEO, will now be Quepasa’s COO. In a release, John Abbot had the following to say about the new partners’ contribution: “By emphasizing social discovery, focusing on the people users want to know rather than the people they already know, the service has built a large and growing user base, especially in the teen and young adult demographic.”
Read More:
http://webcast.broadcastnewsroom.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=1598261
Harper Seven Beckham Makes Her Debut on Twitter
July 19, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Yesterday, Harper Seven Beckham, daughter of Victoria and David Beckham, was introduced to the public through her mother’s Twitter account. Harper Seven was born on July 10th in Los Angeles, California. By personally releasing a photo of their newborn daughter, perhaps the Beckhams were attempting to assuage the paparazzi first-shot hunting season that Victoria would likely see herself in once she recuperated and began moving about town more freely. Of course, the Beckhams could simply be like everyone else — at least in the ways-of-using-social-media department — and be content to share the image of their family’s new addition to all their far-flung family and friends in one fell swoop.
Overall, it seems celebrities continue to embrace social networking for new and old ways of reaching out to the public. Where before a magazine cover might have been in order, personal photos of the child taken by each parent were shared on various social networking sites (Twitter just happened to have the scoop via the former Posh Spice).
In case anyone was still unaware of the fact, Victoria Beckham’s favorite novel is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. The BBC is reporting that Harper Seven was named after the beloved American author.
Read More:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14181210
http://twitter.com/#!/victoriabeckham
Google Hands Out Badges to Competitive Readers
July 18, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
This week Google is keeping its social momentum going by setting free onto the web its new Google News badges. It’s definitely a social feature for those who like to share, and let’s just say it out right, brag a little about all the stuff they read. Yes, for these folks, badges that track reading and prominently display to others their “badge level” are just the thing. The badges are sharable among Google contacts.
The reader-rank system uses badges that cover many topics. According to Natasha Mohanty, the author of the Google Blog post that revealed the news, there’s more than 500 types of badges for competitive readers to collect. Among those categories, readers can aspire to reach, in descending order, Ultimate, Platinum, Gold, and Silver levels on any given subject.
Google dishes out the badges to users who do their politics, sports, and other daily fare reading through Google News and have their web browser history enabled; it’s also necessary for readers to be logged into their Google accounts while they tire their eyes out a bit.
Google, once again stressing its hard-earned user-privacy sensitivity, is letting people know that the badges are “private by default,” which is another way of saying that they’re going about the introduction of their new features in way that’s very unlike Facebook. Even once users opt to share their badges, the specific articles they’ve read to achieve their status will remain private.
Read More:
http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/shareable-google-news-badges-for-your.html
Social Media Inside the Courtroom
July 14, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Last week, what Time Magazine has called “the first major murder trial of the social-media age” came to a close with a not-guilty verdict for Casey Anthony, a woman accused of murdering her own two-year-old daughter, Caylee Marie, in 2008. Besides the intensity with which the case was followed online, the case’s very beginnings are found in the social media world. As it was pointed out in Time, the first person to give notice of Caylee Marie’s disappearance was her grandmother, Cindy Anthony, and she did so by way of a MySpace posting that dates to July 3, 2008. In the post Cindy Anthony wrote that her daughter Casey was not allowing her to see Caylee. It would be three more days before Cindy contacted the police about the unknown whereabouts of her granddaughter.
But that’s not where the case’s connection to social media ends. Walter Pacheco, who writes for the Orlando Sentinel, just wrote a piece concerning the Casey Anthony defense team’s innovative use of Twitter, Facebook, and blog postings: use the postings to create a public opinion analysis and refine trial strategy with the findings. Certainly, the analysis was not the only factor to deliver the defense team’s unexpected victory, but the method is now tied to a winning trial.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2077969,00.html#ixzz1S7t01kN4
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2015603216_anthonytrial14.html
Privacy Revolution @ Google+?
July 13, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Although Google+ has been greatly lauded for tackling (and side-stepping) certain privacy issues that have plagued Facebook for the eons it’s been since its 2004 inception, what is actually being referred to here is a revolution of social networking heads of state. More specifically, the fact that Larry Page, Vic Gundotra, and Sergey Brin, all three top-billing execs at Google, and numbers two, three, and four, respectively, on the Google+ rankings, have upped their privacy settings by concealing the number of people they have in Circles (friends) and the number of people that follow them. By concealing the numbers, they’ve lost their place on the rankings.
No one is thinking this is a coincidence, most especially because Google+’s most popular user, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had the idea to change his Google+ account’s privacy settings at the exact same time and in the exact same way as the Google captains. There’s no official word about what prompted the apparently unified front to act as it did, or how Zuckerberg benefits from relinquishing a prized number one spot on his big competitor’s network. Nathan Olivarez-Giles, who covers the Los Angeles Times’ tech beat, is positing that the privacy revival at Google+ might be Google’s attempt to bring “content and interaction” into focus instead of “popularity,” which in some ways is at the very heart of Facebook. But his theory still doesn’t explain Zuckerberg’s involvement.
As things stand, the new number one is the technology writer Robert Scoble. (The new number five is Tom Anderson).
Read More:
Underfunded Scientists Hit Up the Web for Cash (Successfully)
July 11, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Crowdsourcing is nothing new, but as a way of funding investigative research at a public institution of higher learning, well, it does constitute a somewhat marked departure from the traditional path to financing. The New York Times is claiming to have found the first example of such an occurrence.
The scientists (biologists) in question have so far raised $4, 873 through crowdsourcing. One, Dr. Jennifer Calkins, teaches biology at Evergreen State College as an adjunct professor; Dr. Jennifer Gee is the second biologist and she’s the Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station’s interim manager.
The biologists pointed out to would-be donors where the pooled money would be spent: “By contributing to this project you will support a study of this little known species as we examine its behavior and evolution in its natural habitat, a space encroached upon by both urban sprawl and tension surrounding narcotics trafficking.” That would be under-studied quail species of the Callipepla genus: Callipepla douglasii (pictured at right).
Kickstarter.com was the site used to get the money together. The site is usually host to endeavors that lean heavily toward the visual and (non-explicitly scientific) creative arts, but the quail research project was embraced and funded.
The two scientists reported that although they were offering, among other things, trading cards, postcards, and T-shirts for the donations, most people who donated money requested a signed copy of their upcoming volume, “The Quail Diaries.”
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/science/12crowd.html?ref=technology
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/401217730/the-quail-diaries-in-search-of-the-elegant-quail
Facebook CEO Asks FB Aspirants Out on a Nature Walk
July 8, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Lately, very similar tales have been springing up. Would-be Facebook aspirants have begun — anonymously, because of non-disclosure agreement niceties — to divulge the courting rituals of Facebook’s top brass for the recruitment of new talent. It all begins with an unexpected, but enormously welcomed, of course, email from the top man himself, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, inviting the recipient out on a stroll through a stretch of Palo Alto’s woods.
Those who take him up on the nature outing are then led all the way to a special high point overlooking the Silicon Valley. It’s here that, to go by the account of one of these prospects, Zuckerberg “point[s] out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies.” He then directs the invitee’s gaze toward the Facebook structure and declares that his company will “eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if [the invitee] joined the company, [he/she] could be a part of it all.”
It sounds like an awesome way to be interviewed. Still, among those lucky enough to have the experience, there were reports of instances of “almost choking” on morning coffee at first blush of the surprise invitation and of general feelings of it all being “pretty disorienting.”
It seems some still prefer the old standard of sending out super-polished applications, going through multiple interview sessions, and waiting to hear back on whether they did, or did not, just land their dream job.
Read More:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/A-Walk-in-the-Woods-with-Mark-nytimes-1344654779.html?x=0
Google+ Running a Pilot Program for Business Profiles
July 7, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Christian Oestlien, a Google+ advertising lead, published a blog post yesterday giving notice of Google’s policy of temporarily “discouraging” businesses and “non-user entities” like teams, locations, or organizations from joining its new social network. The reasoning behind the unexpected stance is that Google is working on the construction of an “amazing Google+ experience for businesses” that will be completed before the year is over.
To that end Google will be operating a pilot program on Google+ with selected marketing partners. Acknowledging that the way “users communicate with each other is different from how they communicate with brands,” Oestlien said that Google wanted to “create an optimal experience for both.” In an appended video, he added that such an experience would include “rich analytics and the ability to connect [the Google+] identity to other parts of Google that businesses might use on a daily basis, like AdWords.”
In the meantime, Google will be taking down non-user profiles already up on Google+. While they wait for what’s coming, business and other entities not falling under the “user” category can go to http://goo.gl/zq95C to request inclusion in the pilot program.
It seems Google is finally figuring out how to express its new-found commitment to sociability in its products. Google+ is so far proving to be a big success, providing features comparable to Facebook’s and even many that improve on those of its much-touted rival.
Read More:
https://plus.google.com/105923173045049725307/posts/E3mVj6nskaX?tab=mX
