Kick it…The intrinsic value of Recruiting.com beyond it’s earlier googliciouness and rambunctiousness has been reworked by the Recruitosphere’s alchemist Jason Davis. The transfiguration of Recruiting.com in RecruitingBlogs.com has been more than a reinvention. With less emphasis on the blogging bit and dollops of slobber about “community,” Jason Davis has enhanced his reputation for being the guy in the right place at the right time. If nothing else, the passing of Recruiting.com and ascension of RecruitingBlogs.com, — Jason’s hand in both — reminds me that there is indeed a time and place for everything.

…see if moves! No doubt for some, Recruiting.com will continue to serve a purpose. One imagines that when Steven Rothberg, Andy Headworth,  Jason Buss and other longstanding posters stop submitting their articles we might observe the stillness of the corpse, and the decomposition can begin. While revolting to thinkabout blueflies and maggots doing their thing, without their feasting we could never get beyond the off-topic stink. Who knows, I might continue to post my occasional musings on Recruiting.com too, just to appease the SEO gods. On the other hand, continuing to share the love with a stiff Recruiting.com, well, that would be sick — wouldn’t it? Yeah, probably — sacrilegious too.

Nah, its a goner. Oh well, in blogging as in life I guess, all things must come to an end. Otherwise we would never know that it is time to begin again, would we?

I remember many years ago when subliminal advertising was being used for the first time, at least that we knew of, there was a hullabaloo about it in the U.K. when I was growing up. The concern was this Kremlin-inspired technique was nothing more than a cynical attempt to take over the minds of Coronation Street’s already gullible audience. Right, as if.

Around the same time there was a stink because James Bond [himself!] was kowtowing to big business buying into their latest subliminal ploy, product placement. James Bond as our poster boy for fast cars and hard liquor was consistent with the image of the cold-war lady-killer but pushing product? No, no — it was un-British.

I guess at some point someone should have pointed out that any form of advertising that works below our normal levels of consciousness runs the risk of being viewed by the unwitting as suspect. It hardly matters if the message comes and goes in the blink of an eye or is unobtrusive in other ways, the intent is the same — to influence the subject’s behavior whether they become aware of it or not. Outrageous, huh? The lengths we’ll go to…I mean, really!

Anyway, somewhere between the idea of being able to control feeble minds and getting blotto in the back of a Bentley I made the juvenile decision to enter into the glamorous world of advertising. It was either that or become an MI6 operative, working undercover.

Ahem…

Sharing stories about my life has little use without some context. I am neither famous or interesting nor ever likely to be the object of some biographer’s research. When it comes to documenting my unremarkable life, it is only natural then for me to assume that nobody cares very much about what I might be bloggin’ about, my underlying purpose. Well, other than Mother of course.

Intending my posts to be enough without having to click on a link to get the meaning of it all, if you do go there I hope to share something else that can only be achieved through the portal a link provides. At the very least, I hope if you do follow a link or two you might find a morsel you’ll enjoy enough to overlook my possible self-indulgence in putting it there in the first place, the weakest link.

Contrasting my possible overuse of links with a more deliberate tack, let’s consider their use on blogs where the business of blogging is business, the intended “reader” a machine, not you — the context commercial.

Whether it is linkbaiting, backlinking, backbiting or something else, the strategic use of links for [ultimately] driving traffic is a quite different from my humble sprinkling of breadcrumbs — yes, the Hansel and Gretel variety, Birdbrain! — should one link too many take us up the garden path, lost and unable to find our way back home.

Confused by the likes of Joel Cheesman and other SEO pundits, my pathetically clumsy efforts at improving my googliciousness fell short of expectations. And from there it was a downhill slide I can tell you! It wasn’t long before I all but abandoned my experiments — cross-posting, using keywords, driving my friends crackers, digesting and putzing around on Recruiting.com — realizing that one rarely gets to have their cake and eat it, whatever that nonsensical phrase means.

Instead my daily postings now serve some other purpose, or so I hope. But no, not now…that’s another post [-mortem?] for another time.

Prvious posts in the series:

• Google Juice
• Ripping Yarns
• Recursion Excursion
• The Man in the Know
• The Hungry Blogger

Mon asks a recurring question on my Hungry Blogger post:

I am wondering whether blogging makes a noticeable difference to your SEO. I have been blogging for my company for a few weeks and have no idea whether i am causing any real differences. Are we appearing higher up in google? No idea, but am having a bit of fun while i am doing it at least.

There is plenty of stuff online that will help you understand how to make the most of your blogging, get some Google juice.

Here are a couple of resources you will find helpful, sites you might want bookmark if Google itself isn’t good enough:

• Search Engine Optimization for Blogs – SEO on Problogger
• Blogs and Search Engine Optimization on About.com
• Top 25 SEO Blogs on DailyBlogTips [read through their SEO category, follow your nose]
  

You should look up Michael Specht — he is an Australian blogger like you, closer to home if you want to try and make a human connection. I don’t know what platform you are using but here are Michael’s earlier experiences trying to get some lift off a WordPress platform.

Have you considered joining a community like RecruitingBlogs.com where asking these types of question will get you a more varied response? If not, you should.

Yeah, yeah, yeah…I could have answered Mon in the post’s comments but I need the juice, you know, to gargle with!

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 in 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.

Under normal circumstances, goats’ testicles or a wild boar’s fully loaded bowel [cooked of course] is hardly what a good TV dinner is made of. And, while it is fascinating to think you can make a brew from the water extracted from an elephant’s feces, one wonders how any kind of tea can taste good if it is not served in a china cup. I mean, really.

Along with the spectacle of watching Whitie chomping on gonads and piggie-poo we are introduced to a diverse sampling of endogenous people who eat that stuff like it were sushi-grade tuna loins. Remarkable in so many ways, these assorted nomads and savages forage and hunt everything imaginable – or unimaginable, again, depending on your point of view.

The significance of this is threefold:

• Watching our hero gagging on something entirely ghastly while the scrappy looking natives giggle with delight helps me reconcile the extremes of one man’s [extraordinary] struggle for survival and another man’s [commonplace] daily existence – a metaphor for life in the bubble?
• From the relatively simple activities of primitive Bushmen to our own supposedly sophisticated tribal affiliations online, the social way we share the burden and benefits of gathering, distributing and consuming food [read: information] are remarkably similar.
• There is no accounting for “good taste,” not even in the genteel world of recruiting blogs.

I never understood Optimal Foraging Theory which was first proposed in 1966 by Robert MacArthur and Eric Pianka, and may not even now. However, watching our host pick maggots out of a rotting carcass it might just boil down to this:

If the time and energy spent on tracking, stalking, chasing, killing and prepping a zebra is going to be greater than the calorific value of a single rump-steak dinner — factoring into the equation the risk of having your head kicked in on the hunt — one has to consider the alternative of a protein rich aboriginal picnic as not being so bad after all.

Certainly, a dinner of maggots and dung-flavored coffee is no more disgusting than what some in polite society would pay top-dollar for.

Bear Grylls and his assorted homies demonstrate that — like most animals — we humans have a foraging mechanism hardwired in our brains. Knowing how to grub out an existence is good for surviving as a species as well as in the cutthroat business of multichannel advertising, don’t you know. Hey, and knowing the best techniques for hunting and gathering never stopped a good salesman or a hardworking recruiter from making a living either!

On the show, traipsing over Africa for example, we see that the optimal diet model — describing how foragers make choices about which prey to go for, bucking zebra or wiggly maggots — and patch selection theory which describes the behavior of a forager whose prey is concentrated in areas where there is some commute involved, are easier to spot on Man vs Wild than to read about in scholarly tomes, even if you “cherry pick.”

Although watching our hero eat his food as he trips over it — or in the case of rotting flesh, sniffs out — makes for better television, we do see on occasion examples of the prey being carried back dutifully to the show’s toothless and potbellied extras. I guess that illustrates central place foraging theory, right?

Building on the basic premise of foraging theory PARC researchers, Messrs. Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card — prolific and terrific — stepped it up a notch with the publication of their paper, Information Foraging. The theories developed in this research and the work of their contemporaries has become central to Web design and usability best practice, optimization too.

In information foraging theory our academic heroes Pirolli and Card put their own spin on OFT describing how our primal hardwiring is manifest in our online behavior, proposing strategies for modern-day competitive advantage.

I guess if we spend more time searching for information online than we do on the hoof searching for food then describing ourselves as “informavores” is fair. And if we have migrated to the machine as a source of feeding why wouldn’t we default to the same types of instinctive behavior for getting our needs met here that we might otherwise exhibit in the wild? It makes sense to me.

But what are we getting ourselves into here, have I learned nothing?

Talk of information patches and information scents and information diet is just as dry as OFT blabber, not something I can relate to as easily as Bear Grylls and his ripping yarns.

No, no more. I just want to watch Whitie disembowel a camel, scoop out the poop, climb inside the carcass and adopt the fetal position as the elements outside make life impossible to endure anywhere else but in the belly of a beast. Now, that I can relate to!

The series so far:

• The Hungry Blogger
• The Man in the Know
• Recursion Excursion

As I continue to wrestle with the potential and problems that go with my efforts I am coming to accept that I cannot always grasp enough of what it all means, reminded of the adage: “There is no comfort in the learning zone and there is no learning in the comfort zone.”

Amidst my current bout of self-examination I can at least say why I started blogging: I wanted to be more involved in the online conversations about my work-related passion and interests, coming to understand at the same time how to use social media to help reposition my then employer RCI Recruitment Solutions. A simple enough task or so you’d think, not! As it turned out the “conversation” too often fell on deaf ears, the audience preoccupied with other things. C’est la vie…

Moving on, I could probably come up with a safe list as to why my blogging continues to add value to my business, throwing in an occasional white paper and assorted hype for good measure. However, when all is said and done, for me blogging remains an intensely personal process. It is a process that I remain committed to on many levels, more so now that I am redefining my own practice, itself a work in progress.

Trying to figure out how to make blogging work — figuratively and literally — is, indeed, a fascinating study, worth wrestling with. Above all else, it is a highly adaptable medium and almost seamlessly adjusts to my ongoing experimenting and reinvention. Where else could you get away with the stopping, starting, tripping and falling, changing looks and the rules of grammar every five minutes and pass all that off as authentic, the nature of the beast?

Ah, yes, blogging…and in the Recruitosphere no less!

Applying some of what I’ve learned about blogging in a bubble in a series of posts might make a closer examination of all this reflective stuff easier to digest. For sure, the long, obscure and esoteric posts that have fed my critics in the past may be too much for even me to stomach now, what with changing tastes and all.

More, as I begin to unraveling a web of spaghetti-thinking I am reluctant to bite off more than I can chew in a single sitting, more than you might want to watch me slurping up. Who knows? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?