the author Daniel Scocco arguments that bloggers certainly have an edge over job seekers that do not publish one and he says that it is so because the employee will have more informations on the candidate from his blog and his public presence than just from his resume or interviews.
Those informations will be even more true as they will probably not be mediated and influenced by the will to find a job (that sometimes makes people act a bit).

In the end hiring a blogger is a lower risk proposition because you have more
information and a better idea of how they are going to perform.

I find this idea can be applyed in most other settings where you would otherwise have to take a decision based on asymmetric knowledge that is when you may not have all the informations as the other part (as in many business transactions for instance). Using knowledge from the web (blogs and other social media) may mitigate the risk on both sides and thus may give an advantage to the more open actors over those enterprises that are more close to the outside: prospect clients will prefer doing business with someone from which they know what to expect rather than not!

Openness and partecipation to the social web should thus be considered a competitive advantage by the enterprises.

technorati tags:business, blogs

This is from one of the most hilarious pieces about the IT world I’ve read, yet It’s one of the most true.

It tells us that technologists are sometimes too much in love with thier technology at the risk of considering the users an hurdle on the road to the product. They are not, without the users there whould be no need for the tools we develop.

disclosure: I worked as the main technologist on an ERP project…

I also wanted something that was available over the web (since I was most of the time out of my office or without my own PC) and i did use bloglines but the user-experience was just not right…

I was intrigued by the description of the way RoN readers works and some days ago I’ve started using the newsRiver tool for the OPML editor. I should say that the feeling is better than the tools I’ve used before (i’d also like a more dynamic interface for it, maybe with async calls to the server for page update…).
I was reading very few blogs regularly and use them as starting points to find the relevant news, but using the newsRiver I’m able to keep track of many more feeds than i was used to.

Wrt reading lists i view them strictly as topic or subject related, that is i don’t consider my subscriptions to be a single reading list. I would rather build some reading list out of those subscriptions bundling together those feeds which are relevant for some subjects. My aggregator would then allow me to filter the river of news by reading list showing me only the posts from those feeds.