Amitai Givertz’s Blogversity Blog

In short, some of us need to get out more!

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A personal reflection posted on Recruitomatic today. It is about recruiting big-biller Bill Vick’s presentation at the Dallas Recruiting Roadshow.

Bill’s presentation introduced “bleeding edge” technology to recruiters who by and large — by their own show of hands — were hemorrhaging on old notions of how to use the Internet. It was that that was was most interesting to me. I wondered, “Is the so-called war for talent going to be won with what most recruiters are currently equipped with?” I don’t think so.

You can read the whole post here…

I just posted Food for Thought: Ripping Yarns on Recruitomatic, the fourth in a Food for Thought… series.

Trying to wrap my head around information foraging theory I’m hoping a modern-day forager can help me make some stodgy stuff a little easier to digest…hmmm, maybe not!

The Discovery Channel airs an interesting program called Man vs Wild. The star of the show is Bear Grylls, a real life Action Man who demonstrates techniques for surviving the most inhospitable landscapes.

To accentuate the extreme nature of his adventures — and the diversity of what we eat on planet Earth perhaps — we are treated to the spectacle of watching iron-gut Grylls eat some particularly horrid things, or delicacies depending on your stomach.

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I came across this helpful guide some time ago. It resurfaced today:

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[Can't see the presentation? Click here to view on SlideShare]

Like most of the southeast, Georgia is suffering from one of the worst droughts in living memory.

In a state with such a large population of believers it should come as no surprise that one popular response to this disaster of near-biblical proportions is to take it to the Lord in prayer.

Atlanta, Georgia: ‘Gov Sonny Perdue stepped up to a podium outside the State Capitol on Tuesday and led a solemn crowd of several hundred people in a prayer for rain on his drought-stricken State’ [Greg Bluestein, AOL]. The Governor was joined by other State elected officials [James Salzer & Jim Galloway, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]. Here is man in trouble, forgetting that he himself has declared the separation of his Church from his State.

The age-old debate about God and State aside, as one who frequently stumbles in his own walk I found it disturbing to watch the Governor lead the gathering in prayer. I wondered, “Why don’t any of the faithful have umbrellas? You would think at least one of them would have turned out with a raincoat on, wouldn’t you?”

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This morning I posted Just Another Brick in the Wall on my Recruitomatic blog. It features a video produced by the Digital Ethnography Working Group out of Kansas State University. The group is led by Dr. Michael Wesch…

Wow, these guys produce such good stuff!

Here is another great visual, Information R/evolution:

Information R/evolution follows on from the excellent primer Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us. I posted that a while back on RecruitingBlogs.com.

An interesting post on Social Media Explorer ‘Deconstructing Second Life’ questions the value of Second Life based on a review of the virtual world’s demographics:

The demographics show 8.5 million users, but only 561,000 of those are “active.” While nearly 40 percent of the active ones are age 25-34, only 26 percent are from the United States (with Brazil a distant second a 8.5). The numbers show 57 percent of active users are male…

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Blog Action Day is designed to raise the collective voices of bloggers in a single refrain, this year about the environment.

Hmmm…If 15,000 or so bloggers who are taking part in this day of “mass participation” represent a pathetically small percentage of the total number of bloggers who regularly publish then the 15 million or so readers who could be potentially reached should not be overlooked. For some reason the cynic in me thinks it won’t be.

For my part I don’t want to create more waste in the blogging ecosphere by writing about something simply because everyone else is doing it, not really having anything to say except to note my wariness of anything that smacks of groupthink.

Besides, there will be so much to choose from that it seems the best I could do is find those posts I like best and comment on them, list them here perhaps. That and suggest you stop wasting energy too.

The sweet irony of unrequited love for my efforts to understand the recursive nature of blogs has not reached the point at which I realize my efforts might be better spent researching something else. 

One of the benefits of chasing your tail is that in the process there is so much interesting stuff to discover and think about, all wonderful distractions from the bitter irony that if I am ever successful in my quest I’ll finish up kissing my ass good-bye.

And so I discovered Dr. Richard Barbrook who recently published what looks like a smashing book, Imaginary Futures.  I am setting this aside to study more closely because the thesis is fascinating and there is something about the overall feel of the thing that resonates with me, something retro maybe?

Here is the professor in his own words…

…and the text to study. Also, Sarah Snider’s review in Culture Wars, perhaps a better place to start.

I came across a new social network called projectstars, yet another killer startup. The site touts “blog for stock in the largest enterprise business blogging network” as if to suggest the potential payoff for participation might be worth the absolutely mind-numbing prospect of having to fill out yet another blessed profile first.

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