Fresh Starts: Can Blogs Become a Big Source of Jobs?
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While running a Web log is a skill that more and more employers seek in their employees, finding full-time work in that world is still unusual.
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If you've got a blog and a job, beware. The two sometimes don't go together, as many ex-workers are finding out. By Rachel Metz.
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A new service wants to match up popular bloggers with marketers to create the online equivalent of magazine 'advertorials.' Some worry it would bring blogs' integrity into question. By Daniel Terdiman.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Hunting for ways to boost revenue, a growing number of small businesses are adding another weapon to their marketing arsenal: blogging. A blog lures more traffic to a company's website because it improves chances the site will reach the top of search-engine results.
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Hasin Hayder has started up a new project that he's documented in a new blog entry - the creation of a new jobs website in PHP.   I was involved in making a job site few days ago. During the development, I have studied how easily anyone can develop a job site using PHP (language independent in true sense) . So I decide to write a blog post about my experience and here it goes. But note that this article is not about scaling or balancing the load on your site during heavy traffic, heh heh.   He comments on the startup process surrounding this type of site and makes suggestions about something to consider for your careers site - pulling job content from other sites in two ways - screen scraping and using the job search APIs out there.
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As the job market heats up, interest in online business networking is starting to soar - turning a one-time novelty into a necessity for millions of business professionals in search of jobs or business contacts.
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When Richard Jalichandra became Technorati&#39;s CEO in October, the company, a blogging and Web 2.0 pioneer, had generated enough drama in recent years to rival a soap opera.Founded in 2002 and led by its charismatic founder and CEO David Sifry, Technorati was a central player in the dizzying rise of blogs, serving as bloggers&#39; preferred search engine and embracing the spirit and technology of the Web 2.0 renaissance.But by 2005, many of its most ardent fans had become regular and increasingly disenchanted critics, questioning everything from Technorati&#39;s ability to index and rank blogs properly to its business partnerships and decisions.Last year saw much management upheaval, as Sifry, Vice President of Engineering Adam Hertz, Chief Technologist Tantek Celik, and others left their posts, opening the door to new arrivals, including Jalichandra, who has broad experience with Internet startups and online media. (Sifry remains Technorati&#39;s board chairman.)IDG News Service talked to Jalichandra last week about Technorati&#39;s future and its biggest challenges and opportunities. The following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted at the Social Networking Conference in Miami Beach, where Jalichandra gave a speech.IDGNS: Is calling Technorati a blog search engine too narrow a definition of what the company does?Jalichandra: Our heritage has been, is and will always be in blog search. We&#39;re one of only two real-time search indexes covering the blogosphere: us and Google. That said, one of the things we found people are doing on our site is trying to discover things that are going on in the blogosphere or follow conversations. So we recently added a discovery layer [called Percolator] on top of the search infrastructure so people can have more of a reading/browsing experience in addition to searching. Percolator&#39;s intention is to find out what&#39;s gaining attention either in blogs or mainstream media.IDGNS: The boundaries between blogs and conventional Web sites have blurred significantly in recent years. How do you tackle that challenge if your mission is to index blogs specifically?Jalichandra: Yes, there&#39;s a huge blur that&#39;s occurring. Mainstream media gets it now, and they realize that they can create a lot more content with participation from the community. Today, a lot of mainstream media articles are written on a blogging platform as opposed to a [traditional] content management system, and it&#39;s an interesting challenge.IDGNS: Has Technorati then become a much broader and more encompassing search engine?Jalichandra: That&#39;s absolutely true. Our audience has more than doubled in size in the last year, and so has the amount of data in our index. We&#39;re definitely collecting and serving a lot more information than we have in the past.[According to comScore, Technorati&#39;s traffic grew from 948,000 unique visitors in December 2006 to 2.8 million in December 2007. By comparison, Google&#39;s Blog Search declined from 398,000 unique visitors to 359,000 in that period, although Google also serves up blog results in other of its engines, like News, Images and general Web search. Meanwhile, Technorati says it currently tracks 112.8 million blogs and more than 250 million &quot;pieces of tagged social media.&quot;]IDGNS: Are the executive changes at Technorati now finished?Jalichandra: In the evolution of any company, and particularly startups, you have different skill sets for different stages. Our founder [David Sifry] is an amazing technologist, product evangelist and visionary, and he realized about a year ago that the business was getting big enough and that he needed professional media expertise, because at the end of the day the ultimate business model will be based around online advertising -- and he didn&#39;t have that background. Then, subsequently, we had some more people join the company with that kind of media expertise and, if anything, we&#39;re going to be throwing gasoline on the fire and adding a lot of people both on the technology side and the media and business sides.IDGNS: Will Technorati seek more funding?Jalichandra: There are some things we want to do to expand for which we might seek additional funds, but the great thing about where the business is today is we&#39;re sitting on a very large audience that allows us to monetize, so we&#39;re starting to see fairly significant increases in revenue, so that will also help fund some of the growth and expansion.IDGNS: Technorati remains independent and privately held. Will it be sold to a larger company?Jalichandra: My plan is always to build a great business, and those things usually take care of themselves when you build a great business. That&#39;s been my experience and what I intend to do now. You build a great company and either you&#39;re a great independent or somebody else finds a nice fit for you.IDGNS: What are some key goals for Technorati in the coming year?Jalichandra: The high-level objectives are to continue to provide a great user experience, and that&#39;s both search and discovery. On the business side, the objectives are simply stated: to build a monetization infrastructure to grow the business from the revenue side.IDGNS: You carry Google ads. Do you sell your own ads as well?Jalichandra: We do have our own sales force, and they&#39;re doing fantastically well. We recently hired a new VP of sales and a new VP of business development, and they&#39;re really working on building up that revenue machinery.IDGNS: What is your international presence?Jalichandra: We have a joint venture with Technorati Japan, and that&#39;s the only dedicated country-specific site. But in the blogosphere, language doesn&#39;t have a lot of barriers. We&#39;ve counted close to 30 languages that appear regularly in the index. So while we don&#39;t have a very big international focus, by the sheer nature of the blogosphere we&#39;re an international company.IDGNS: Any plans to expand your international presence?Jalichandra: Absolutely. The blogosphere knows no borders so eventually we&#39;ll get there, but we&#39;re still a 30-person startup.IDGNS: A lot of the content in social networks is trapped in those sites. Does Technorati feel it is getting locked out of indexing the content on those very popular sites?Jalichandra: It&#39;s not a concern right now. There&#39;s enough people writing content specifically on blogs as opposed to their MySpace or Facebook page. Typically what you find with MySpace and Facebook is that there isn&#39;t a lot of serious blogging. People are just making one or two sentence proclamations and not writing [in-depth] about a subject matter.IDGNS: Do you have any plans to increase the social applications or features within Technorati?Jalichandra: People have Technorati profiles today, and registered users always check out who is linking to them, so that&#39;s one way that a lot of bloggers use Technorati today. In the future, we&#39;re looking certainly at anything we can do to improve the user experience or the community aspects of it.IDGNS: Do you consider social-news sites like Digg and Slashdot competitors?Jalichandra: What people do on Technorati is different from what they do on Digg. Digg is a more participatory news experience, whereas a lot of people that come to Technorati are looking to just follow a conversation happening on the blogosphere about a topic. I have a feeling that, like me, people use both Digg and Technorati for slightly different things.IDGNS: What can Technorati fans expect to see this year in terms of enhancements to the site?Jalichandra: In December we launched topical navigation categories, and because we have such an amazing amount of data we can create very granular topical areas, so I would look for an expansion of topics that end up with their own channels and sub-channels to highlight the conversations going on in those subject areas.From a blogger standpoint, we also launched Blogger Central in December, and we started putting a number of resources there to be a one-stop shop for bloggers to find out what the latest and greatest and the best way to grow your blog and all that, with Technorati and non-Technorati material.IDGNS: Do you feel you&#39;ve got the spam-blog problem under control at Technorati?Jalichandra: It&#39;s never fully under control because sploggers keep finding new, creative ways. It&#39;s not just us. Every search engine has been spammed to death. We feel we do a reasonably good job of it, considering how much spam there is in the blogosphere. It&#39;s a big part of what we do.
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Blogs and the Web may hurt or change newspapers.
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MyBlogLog has been expanding rapidly in terms of use and popularity ever since Yahoo acquired it in January and is now looking for someone to fill quite an interesting position of MyBlogLog Community Manager. We&#8217;re hiring our first community manager to become a core member of team and a key public face of the service.  [...]
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InfoWorld - SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.,-- Blogging got its share of attention at Demo@15, as the conference that highlights future products brought to its stage companies that are taking blogging in new directions.
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Blogs, or Web logs, have become very popular, influencing even the mainstream media. Merriam-Webster defines a blog as: &quot;a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks.
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Blogs Are Great for Search Engine Ranking  Blogs have had a profound effect on communications and marketing since their development and early adoption but are still a mystery to many. According to Google Definitions (enter: define:Blog into Google search window), Blogs can be several things to different people but the simplest ...
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This week you'll learn about the resource needs that business bloggers will want to consider, and how to rally the troops behind a blogging initiative. As many bloggers have learned, blogging is fairly simple - but it's not effortless. By Steve Broback and DL Byron. 0724
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MSN Spaces debuted in its test form as Microsoft became the latest company to offer blogging to the masses. MSN Spaces, which allows users without highly technical skills to set up Web journals, is targeted
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Blog: New blog site, started by political veterans and bloggers, is trying something new--allowing Net roots activists to help write legislation.
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As unemployment rates dip below peak dot-com boom levels, companies are competing fiercely for the brightest new college grads.Google's strategy for hiring young talentGetting hired via social network
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By Stephanie Armour  As the job market heats up, interest in online business networking is starting to soar -- turning a one-time novelty into a necessity for millions of business professionals in search of jobs or business contacts.