Archive for the 'Blog Swap' Category

Bah, humbug!

Published by Amitai Givertz on July 26, 2006 in Blog Swap and Recruiting. 2 Comments

Well, Colin Kingsbury says: “Rumors of my blogswap death are greatly exaggerated.” I say: “Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

Great post from Colin for Blog Swap week 3.999. Enjoy!

Bah, humbug!

Being a contrarian has historically been a mixed career move. On one hand, it may get a statue put up in your honor. On the other hand, it will likely be erected on the spot where you were hanged, drawn, and quartered before a cheering crowd of thousands. In business these days the risks are considerably smaller to be sure, but saying I told you so still isn’t likely to earn you an invite to this season’s smart parties. Grinning toady boosterism is still the best way to make friends, though one must be careful to not take it too far lest you be forced to reinvent yourself as a Cautionary Example.

But enough of that – I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him, or at least ask some pointed questions. Caesar in this case being Generation Y and its accessories like MySpace, which of late have been the obsession of nearly every online recruiting publication. Just today, one well-respected industry luminary wrote,

If you have seen or used MySpace.com or Facebook, you are looking at the type of tools recruiters will be using in just a few months. Do you have a profile on MySpace? Why not?

When I read things like this my mind flips immediately to this. And that brings up a lot of interesting points to consider.

Of course, MySpace is clearly going to own the world. It is already one of the most-visited sites on the ‘Net and it’s rare to find a person not yet old enough to rent a car who doesn’t have a profile. Orkut is as obscure as its name, and Friendster is your father’s social-networking Oldsmobile, so clearly Rupert Murdoch made a wise investment and will shortly own an even larger part of the world than he already does. Of course, back in 1999 people were saying all the same things, and perhaps more, about none other than AOL. While Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still scrubbing the grad-school muck out from under their fingernails, Steve Case was preparing to launch the Titanic of Web 1.0 deals.

Today AOL is almost entirely an object of ridicule whose complete disappearance from the Internet would be celebrated in those few areas where its passing was not entirely unnoticed. The best plan they can come up with seems to be to throw out the one part of the business that makes money in hopes of boosting the future prospects of the parts that don’t. If approved, this will doubtless provide a fitting Viking funeral for a company that has proven that just because you do nothing wrong in your first ten years of business doesn’t mean you won’t screw up every single thing you do in the ten that follow.

One of the most interesting bits of willful blindness in the social-networking space that I see has to do with age. There is no question that MySpace et. al. are a huge presence in youth culture at the moment, and every comment on the subject notes the fact that anyone old enough to rent a car is more or less out of the loop. This is the typical pattern of pop culture sensations going back at least as far as, well, pop culture. I have to wonder, did recruiting experts of the late 1980s suggest that these were the future of corporate personnel planning?

OK, so I am being a little gratuitous. But I don’t think it’s gratuitous to note that the current excitement over social networking is driven almost entirely by people under a very young age, and we have yet to see how the relationship between this extraordinarily-fickle audience and this extraordinarily-fickle technology changes as this audience grows up. Among other things, the basic patterns of social life change enormously between 25 and 35. These could of course strengthen the presence of tools like MySpace, but they could just as likely mean that these services have a loyal but short-term audience, not unlike Modern Bride magazine. I don’t think it’s the least bit unfair to say that social networking has been underwhelming outside the old-enough-to-drink crowd; despite endless hype, services like Ryze and LinkedIn remain niche tools on the best of days.

Last, let’s talk a little about Generation Y and how it is going to force companies to rethink the nature of work itself and other such grandiosities. Everyone talks about how they are going to change the workplace but no one spends much time thinking about how the workplace will change them. Up until the age of 22 or so, most kids spend most of their time with other kids, in school environments built to cater to them. Not until they enter the workforce are they really required to spend a large chunk of time with people of widely-varying ages and where their success and satisfaction are not the first order of business. This is the root of Mark Twain’s famous quip about leaving home at 18 and returning at 21, amazed to find how much wiser his parents had become in just a few years. Hey, I sympathize: my generation was supposed to be full of nothing but anti-corporate, directionless slackers, but that was before we started founding Internet companies and complaining about Generation Y and the Baby Boomers stealing all the attention.

© Copyright 2006 Colin W. Kingsbury

Late Breaking News!

Published by Amitai Givertz on July 26, 2006 in Blog Swap. 0 Comments

Timing is everything.

Recruitomatic’s contribution to this week’s Blog Swap appears on Diggings. Diggings is a blog about recruitment advertising, media, publishing and so on. Recruitomatic’s post is about advertisng and media too, and about spamming in particular. That makes two commentaries on the subject this week: I Think, Therefore I Spam on Toby Dayton’s spot and Sex & Spammers: Lightening Strikes & Other Acts of God posted here.

Colin Kingsbury is the man behind the machine that makes the HRMDirect blog click. I am gutted that his guest post on Amitai Givertz’s Recruitmatic Blog has been deferred to later date but, in fairness to Colin who I spoke with at length earlier this week, he is changing the world. Pretty good for a man who reads Maoist tracts and considers himself old at minus-40.

If I could pick a guest post from Colin it would be Eggregious or Eggfective? His post talks about intrusive and in-your-face advertising too and references Shally Sterkerl’s commentary Didn’t like SMS recruiting? Think again! which I also point to in my Diggings’ post. Of course, Colin’s absence here this week is, indeed, eggregious. That makes this a good post for me to pick too.

Stay tuned for week four of the Blog Swap. It promises to be a corker!

Sumser, Davis, Goldberg, Cheesman et al: How Thought Leaders Leave Some of Us All Thunked Out

Published by Amitai Givertz on July 24, 2006 in Blog Swap and Business Matters. 8 Comments

We are gorged on food for thought. Yet, as I reflect on an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, more to ruminate on:
 
Item numbers one and two – John Sumser: Think twice before writing a post in a moment of righteous indignation – as in Bill Cosby & John Sumser: Icons or Has-beens?  – and avoid making the same mistake I did in saying “I will now switch [John Sumser] off”.  For one thing, if you turn a “thought leader” off you might run out of things to think about. For another, when the subject attempts to convey a possible explanation for their bad behavior you can’t reply when it’s obvious you’ve continued reading after you promised you wouldn’t. A little like Daddy’s Playboy, if you know what I mean. It’s embarrassing, but I’ll quote John Sumser from last week’s Neurobiology of Recruiting anyway:

“My idea of me (my self or self-concept) is…complicated. Since I can’t actually have an external experience of me, I am stuck trying to compare, contrast, verify, validate, project and refract my various “experiences” of you (and others) against my experiences of me. It’s a lifetime’s worth of Rubic’s cube…Self concept runs about six months behind the contemporary reality. Concept of others runs about 90 days out of phase with the actual person. Our last conversation was happening moments before it felt like we had it.”

Hmmm…Are we to be left scratching our heads trying to deconstruct the real enigma that is John Sumser? As I stare at those few lines trying to decipher what they really mean, if they mean anything at all, I realize that my coffee has gone stone cold and I need a shave. It must be a time-lag, leadership thing. Turn John Sumser off? How could I when…

Item number three – Recruiting.com’s (Jason Davis) leadership initiative the Blog Swap rolls into its third week. John Sumser’s Thought Leadership on Jim Stroud’s highly leveraged blog is a titillating post. My only concerns are: a) it appears I cannot trackback or comment and the item has a curiously jerry-rigged permalink – hardly in the spirit of the thing I think; and b) it touches on things many of us were grappling with as a slew of hard-to-digest news came across the wires.  Alas, John Sumser’s post did not satiate my need to understand what all this news masquerading as thought leadership really means. I’ll come that in a jiffy, but first:

“Thought leadership” is one of the phrases, like “best-of-breed” and “mindshare” that have an Orwellian ring about them that simply agitates the rebel in me. I know that those things in of themselves are not bad, no more than seed-money is sleazy, but anything that suggests that my brains need to be scrambled as part of a leadership strategy leaves me, well, muddled. Having had my brains well and truly scrambled this week, I read John Sumser’s thought terminating cliché with a strong sense of having to proceed with caution. I mean, I can’t be the only one wondering what the hell’s going on, can I?

Item four – Jason Goldberg:  I do not know the CEO of Jobster so I cannot say anything nice about him - which seems to be the fashion - or otherwise. What I can say is this: a) I am sure Jobster’s new backers Reed Elsevier must have been impressed with the chief’s frugal practice of eating his own dog food; b) Jason Goldberg is a clever strategist. Does that automatically make him a thought leader? While strategic thinking and thought leadership aren’t mutually exclusive I have no doubt which cerebral function landed Jobster the funding that now allows them to one day face-off against the current global online recruiting monolith. While Monster Worldwide is landlocked in its Web 1:0 architecture it is kept afloat by more money than some third-world countries have access to. I think the paltry $18 million Jason Goldberg just secured confirms the Darwinian notion that size does not equate to fitness, and that dog food is an acquired taste.

I am not an astute analyst. I can only speculate along with the majority who – like me – are self-appointed pundits at best.  Fortunately, as I claim to be “thought provoking” and not “opinion forming” it hardly matters whether I am right or wrong.  So, here’s my guess:

In the coming months we will see a proliferation of Web 2:0 applications like the recently announced emurse. Jason Goldberg knows these clever startups cannot survive as stand-alone applications because job seekers will not go here for this and there for that. He will snap them up putting together an integrated mosaic of new-web innovation that elevates Jobster above Monster for experience and stickiness and buzz-worthiness. Jobster will continue to leverage its content advantage: free subject matter expertise on tap and a sexy little URL to boot. I can’t imagine Jason Goldberg acquired Recruiting.com to become simpatico with fellow publisher and thought leader David Manaster so watch. I predict it will start with innocuous banner ads and end up with a full-blown makeover for Recruiting.com where the disorganized recruitosphere – minus a few farm yard animals – will be reduced to a Big Brother dystopia. Check back in 2010 if your memory – and predictive capacity – has not been completely erased.
 
Items six and seven: Joel Cheesman and assorted Yahoos!:  I am in two minds about Cheezhead’s status as a thought leader. If thought is singularly (as in search engine optimization) focused (as in HR) then maybe Joel Cheesman has transcended thought leadership and achieving a state of near-godhead. Indeed, John Sumser in his “Thought Leadership” blog swap characterizes Joel Cheesman as an out-of-the-box leader, top-of-Sumser’s-mind. On the other hand, if thought is a multifaceted and hopelessly convoluted thing, perhaps the big cheese is a more of a left-brain kind of guy.  Either way, Joel Cheesman is a clever entrepreneur.  I only wish I could make sense of all the news-worthy tidbits he throws us. I must be a dummy.

In a recent post yahoo! and newspapers entertain parternship Joel Cheesman comments on a widely reported, but woefully under analyzed, piece of speculation. Looking at how the job boards and newspaper classifieds are faring, it is clear that misery loves company.  What is curious to me is why, rather than getting into bed with a bunch of yahoos, old-money Hearst Corporation doesn’t take a leaf out the New York Times’ book and buy a piece of property like Indeed.com. Perhaps Reed Elsevier knows more about leadership than the publishing industry leaders may have thought.

Hotshot Dan Finnigan is a better salesman than he is a thought leader. Given the choice, I know which I’d rather be. Consider, dog food has got to taste a lot better than grey matter, right? In the same way as the rainmaker appears to be revisiting the magic formula of his brilliant integration of newsprint and CareerBuilder it may just be that everyone involved is going to learn a hard lesson about being in the right place at the right time. Past performance is nothing but past perfomance. That’s my two cents worth.

On the subject of sales hype, I am reminded of a valuable lesson taught to me by a favorite mentor: “When the shit hits the fan, it’s never evenly distributed.”  Joel Cheesman shows us that being a thought leader does not always translate into being a good-fortune teller. Oh, poo!

Well, there you have it. Are you all thunked out too? Realizing the error in my ways, I have reinstated John Sumser and interbiznet in my programming of re-runs. After all, what hopes do I have in this business without a collective memory to draw on?

Bill Cosby & John Sumser: Icons or Has-beens?

Published by Amitai Givertz on July 13, 2006 in Blog Swap and Blogging. 4 Comments

I grew up watching Bill Cosby. Bill Cosby helped me form positive images of African-Americans different from the stereotypes so often portrayed in the media. He also made me laugh. Similarly, I grew up reading John Sumser. John helped me form a view of online recruiting that was a refreshing alternative to a world where applicant tracking was confused with bar coding resumes. He also made me think.

I’m told being a celebrity is no easy thing to manage. It seems to me celebrity is something you have to work at, especially when the latest trends are moving faster than your comedy, faster than your commentary. Elder status in your community confers certain privileges – things that come with rank and good standing – reverence and patronage being good examples. But, just as many in the African-American community now reject Bill Cosby’s holier-than-thou position on some social issues – even though he may be right – I am coming to wonder if John Sumser is increasingly out of step with the community he helped to foster.

Some might argue the retro look of John Susmer’s web site is analogous to a 60’s Dunkin’ Donuts – nostalgic, warm and cozy. Some would say it represents a lack of attention to keeping up with the times, almost contemptuous of its readers. Some might argue the relevancy of white papers and trend reports from years gone by are as pertinent today as when they were when they were first published. Maybe so for the ill-informed, but for those of us who have read it over and over, the value is purely sentimental.  I – and many other content-hungry consumers – now have choices for where to get our buzz-worthy news from, our industry analysis, our market research and our opinions. It seems to me – and I could be off the mark, so you decide – John’s getting tired. For as much as I respect and admire John Sumser for what he has contributed to my understanding and appreciation of the space I now blog in, I have to ask: “What have you done for me lately?”

What’s the point? Just click-over and move on right? Why be a blowhard? I’ll try and explain why:

The Blog Swap is a great idea. It is an experiment that I am committed to actively participate in. As such, I am obliged to giving it my very best and earnest effort.  It is a way for me to honor my peers, you – my readers, and most certainly, my mentors too. I see the value of this collaboration as being quintessentially communal, worthwhile. But it also has to be authentic too. With that said, it sticks in my craw to read patronizing drivel coming from John Sumser passed off as blog swapping. I quote and comment:

We’ve agreed to help the blogosphere [Well, John, thank you so very, very much. We would have sunk into wasted oblivion without you] by publishing an article from a guest writer each week as a part of the recruiting blogswap. As you know, a number of bloggers have banded together [like gutter-snipes mobilizing to mug the gullible among you] to promote each other [right, each other, but not you. You are too lofty to be banding together with the likes of us lowly pukes, right, John?]. Our part [for which we are eternally grateful, big-white bwana] is to give the whole thing a much wider audience [well I hope you publish this then!]. It’s important that these [lost and lonely] voices get heard [damn right, John – it is important].

Please go to interbiznet to read the rest of the John’s demeaning intro to EXCELER8ion’s “guest” post – if you can find it. For someone who espouses the value of easy web navigation, interbiznet is a cobbler with no shoes.  Julian and Shannon Seery Gude are bloggers who I hardly know but have come to respect and admire through their work. John Sumser is a pseudo-blogger who I once thought I knew and am now happy to forget.

As for running a full thirty two weeks, I can tell you for sure, the Blog Swap will only run for thirty one weeks at best. My puny mind and impudence would obviously leave John Sumser and his reader’s gasping for air. So I shall not bother them further.  Not because my “youthful naiveté” might be so irritating to a fuddy-duddy, but because that is the very thing that affords me the opportunity to point out for you: the emperor has no clothes on. 

As Bill Cosby so aptly put it, “Anyone can dabble, but once you’ve made that commitment, your blood has that particular thing in it, and it’s very hard for people to stop you.” Hey, that’s me. Bill Cosby may be a has-been but I shall continue to watch. John Sumser I shall now switch off. I’ve seen enough of the re-runs.

Top Five Things Recruiters Did Pre-Internet

Published by Amitai Givertz on July 12, 2006 in Blog Swap, Human Resources and Recruiting. 7 Comments

Here is this week’s guest post by fellow Blog Swap swapper Beth N. Carvin who is the CEO of the Nobscot Corporation. Beth’s company provides a valuable resource for employers who realize they need help with retention and metrics - that’s many of us I guess! Enjoy:

Top Five Things Recruiters Did Pre-Internet

Do you ever find yourself exclaiming, “How did we ever live without email and the Internet?”

I know I do.  And yet thinking back, not only did we live and work without today’s technology, we prospered. Which got me thinking -  Is there anything innovative that we can learn in recruiting today from how we recruited back before we had today’s tools of the trade?

Here’s my list of the Top 5 things that successful recruiters did pre-Internet. Maybe you can find some pearls of wisdom from the past that will help you with your recruiting today.

1. Disciplined System

When you had to recruit without the luxury of the Internet, there were never enough hours in the day to get everything done. If you wanted to reach your billing goals, you absolutely had to stick to a strict work schedule.

The one that I was trained on looked something like this:

8:30a - 9:30a         Morning Meeting

9:30a - 11:00a       Company Calling and Company Visits

11:00a - 12:00p     Interviewing, Matching, Presenting, Prepping

12:00p - 1:00p       Lunch

1:00p - 2:00p         Sourcing

2:00p - 4:00p         Recruiting Calls

4:00p - 5:00p         Interviewing, Matching, Presenting, Prepping

5:00p - 5:30p         Daily Planner for Tomorrow

5:30p - 6:30p        (optional) Interviewing, Matching, Prepping

Sticking to this schedule was in many ways the key to our success. You couldn’t help but getting job orders and sendouts and placements when you worked the system every day without fail.

2. Meeting Companies

Before technology, the business world was smaller and more localized. Recruiters worked in territories by industry or discipline and location. After receiving a job order, we always set up company visits. This was critical for improving your chance of filling the position. Why? Three reasons:

a. You got a feel for which applicants would fit in best with the company.

b. You had a chance to build rapport with the hiring authority.

c. You had an opportunity to let the company know exactly how you worked. This might include a lesson on why it is important to make offers quickly so as not to lose the best applicants.

3. Meeting Applicants

I’m still horrified at the thought of recruiters sending out applicants that they have never met.  This was drilled into my head very strongly in my early days of recruiting in the mid-1980s. The story was told by the President of my firm about the one and only time he sent an applicant out without meeting him first. The applicant showed up to the interview in cut-off jean shorts and generally made a bad first impression on the company. The President was mortified in front of his client.

Meeting an applicant in person allows you to judge whether or not the applicant will fit in as an employee in your client’s company. How someone acts in email is often very different from how he or she may act in person. It also gives you a great gauge for how much you will need to prep your applicant prior to his or her interview.

4. Prepping the Applicant

Because communication is so quick with technology today, there are fewer and fewer recruiters who prep their applicants before an interview. This was (and still should be) a critical step toward making a placement. There are many applicants who are great employees but lousy interviewees. You owe it to your client companies to make sure they don’t turn down a great employee because of poor interviewing skills.

My favorite prep story is with applicant Wendy the Accountant. Wendy came into my office and slumped down into the chair with about as much energy as a slug on a hot day. But her skills were great, her work history was stable and she had terrific work references. I can remember that my Manager saw me sit Wendy down in the lobby while I set her up for an interview. My manager said, “Beth, where are you sending that applicant?”  I replied, “Company X” My manager looked at me with horror on her face, “Not Company X. That’s our best client!” I said, “Trust me. She is going to do great. I am going to prep her before she goes.”

I set up the interview and spent the next 1/2 hour prepping Wendy for her interview. I let her know how great she was for the job and that she should walk in their with energy and confidence. By the time she left my building, the whole office watched her out the window walking to her car with great speed and enthusiasm. About an hour and 1/2 later I received a call from Company X. Wendy was still there and they were calling to ask my permission to make her a job offer on the spot. True story. The power of the prep.

5. Sales and Psychology Skills

It’s difficult to be a good salesperson over email. Sales is very much about listening and that is difficult to do with technology. One of the things that makes recruiting so challenging (and interesting!) is that you are not selling widgets. Widets would be easy to sell. Widgets don’t have fears of making changes, widgets don’t have husbands, wives and mothers telling them what to do and widgets don’t have to give two weeks notice to a company that doesn’t want to lose them.

It’s the job of the recruiter to be able to help their applicants get the good things that they want. There’s a lot of hand holding that needs to take place in Recruiting. It’s difficult to hold hands through a keyboard.

© Copyright 2006 Beth N. Carvin.

Brand Aid

Published by Amitai Givertz on July 7, 2006 in Blog Swap and Recruiting. 6 Comments

I know one of the reasons why I was interested in participating in the Blog Swap was so that I could celebrate my own emerging blogebrity while better understanding a medium which I sense one day will replace – if only for me – Oprah, the corporal world and email. Quite possibly in that order. As I am going through the list of the blog swappers I am beginning to see each of them through a prism of community whereas prior I may have seen them as simply promoting a point of view or product offering or their availability for new employment. So, it is with this new perspective that I offer this suggestion:

1. Take a moment to read – Great Brands in Action posted today by systematicHR.
 
2. Snuggle up with a warm cup of cocoa and read David Kippen’s TMP blog which also discusses employer branding.

3. Sit back and wait.

systematicHR asks a great question in his post. I know from my own experience how trying it can be to ask questions to be ignored by those presumably best qualified to answer them. If this blog swap thing has any legs beyond the sharing of content – which in itself may serve little meaningful purpose over time – it should be the swapping of comments, ideas and new perspectives for us all to share and learn from. It should be to ensure there is communication even within the broader community among those of us who seek more from the Blog Swap experience than an honorable mention and yet-to-materialize blog-bling and backtracks.

systematicHR says: “Nobody markets for you better than your own employee workforce.” True, but I hope David will take a slightly different view recognizing there is more of an iceberg below the waterline than above it.

Don’t Leave Home Without It

Published by Amitai Givertz on July 5, 2006 in Blog Swap and Recruiting. 1 Comment

This post is the first in a series for the Blog Swap. Here, Claudia Faust who is a founding partner at ImprovedExperience.com, takes a view on “Possibility Recruiting”:

Don’t Leave Home Without It

“Did it work?  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is that the possibility exists that it could.”  Amitai Givertz

 “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears that this is true.”  James Branch Cabell

I love the idea of Possibility Recruiting because – well, let’s be honest here, I am a die-hard optimist.  This gets me into trouble occasionally (well, more often than that, since I’m being honest).  However, I still like being this way.  So, thinking of recruiting as exploring what is possible?  Works for me.

That’s the simple part.  It gets more complicated when I admit that Possibility and Optimism aren’t exactly the same thing.  Oh, they’re compatible, no doubt – but in a distant-cousin sort of way.  Possibility is potential; it is a concept that is not yet verified.  Optimism, on the other hand, is a general feeling that everything is going to turn out just fine.  When taken to an extreme, Optimism beats a path to the doorway of Complete Denial.  You know, that place where natural laws (like gravity and physics) don’t apply to you.

It is also easy to confuse possibility and creativity – again compatible, but different.  Creativity is the ability to bring something new into existence.  Guess what happens when that goes into overdrive?  We’ve all been there: Utter Chaos.

It seems like a little balance might be good.  Optimism and creativity are balanced when you add a sense of purpose and persistence in measuring the outcome.  You see a goal, you try something, you measure how well it worked, and then you try again.  Now you’re talking Possibility Recruiting.  And what’s the point?  Why, to innovate of course. 

Innovation is the breakfast of champions in business, a primary driver of competitive advantage.  But that’s not all you get with Possibility Recruiting; you also get great experience (aka, the Art of Figuring Out for Yourself What Others Already Know Is True); and the ability to measure your efforts (aka, the Art of Communicating to the Business You Serve).  What more could you ask?

Possibility Recruiting.  Don’t leave home without it.

© Copyright 2006 Claudia Faust.

I Am Not A Paid Shill Either. I Do It for Free.

Published by Amitai Givertz on July 5, 2006 in Blog Swap, Blogging and Business Matters. 2 Comments

No doubt, much of the conversation this morning will be taken up with Blog Swap this and Blog Swap that, and to the extent that some of us have nothing better to do than to smoke our own dope, I guess it might be a conversation worth following. We’ll see.

My first guest post for the swap is for David Kippen. David blogs for TMP. This in itself presented a number of challenges as I sat down to do my thing. Not least of all, David’s is a corporate blog with an obvious bias toward TMP’s money-making interests – and color scheme I might add. And, why not? It is what it is.

Bearing this in mind I had to be sensitive to the nature of the beast. After all, I am a guest and I certainly do not want to be so rude as to find I never get another insertion order from an old friend and corporate ally. But, in light of Jim Durbin’s recent post I Am Not A Paid Shill where he chimes in on a discussion initiated by Joel Cheesman – and my own independence as a citizen-blogger - I had to think twice about what to write. I mean, I’m not an unpaid shill, am I?

I suspect there may a delay in getting my post up on TMP’s site and David Kippen’s otherwise unnamed blog, oddly unbranded I thought. The wheels in Legal grind slowly. And I know it has to go through proofing. So while you’re all waiting, take a look at what Darren Rowse has to say in his post: PayPerPost – Paying Bloggers to Post – First Impressions. Oh, one last thing – I heard on FOX News last week that it now costs 20% more to produce one penny than a penny is actually worth. That’s my two cents worth on shilling.

Blog Swap Diaries: Blogebrity 101

Published by Amitai Givertz on June 29, 2006 in Blog Swap and Blogging. 1 Comment

In a comment made by Yvonne LaRose - who gives career and executive recruiting advice on her splendid site – she asks who came up with the idea of an icon for the Blog Swap.

Using an icon or logo for the Blog Swap bloggers was not my idea. However, I believe that I did invent the term “blog-bling” used in my post Spin the Bottle. The term describes the use of a (prized) icon to adorn one’s blog and to authenticate a claim to blogebrity status. In my post, I linked to Blogebrity.com which makes blog-bling available for their list of celebs. I am sure that my references to blog-bling had no bearing on the decision to revisit a means of letting those of you not included in the Blog Swap know that you are among a group of, well, elite bloggers.

My mother used to say: “The true test of a good idea is the number of people who have the same idea independently of you.“ For the record: my mother invented maternal love and my father invented Duraglit. Neither was ever credited for their remarkable contributions to humanity, even to the extent that they themselves did not refute the widely held opinion – among family at least – that I was a self-centered bastard. Herein are my two primary motives for claiming the term blog-bling as my very own creation.

As a part of my overall strategy for promoting my own blogebrity status, I will be adding blog-bling on Wikipedia with a link back to this very page. That way Mother, Father and their favorite son can be memorialized long after the bling has blong.  Also, I will be applying to be considered for inclusion to Blogebrity.com’s “A list.” That, too is, I believe, my birthright.

Please, if you can find an example or the reference to the use of the term “blog-bling” in any publication prior to my own, would you be nice enough to reply to this post and let me know? That way, anyone who had the same idea, independently of me, can be tracked down and scrutinized appropriately.

Thank you for your continued support and for reading my blog. For those of you who missed it, here is this week’s most read post: Possibility Recruiting.