Tag Archives: google

My Life, Stupid, Work Life

The Trouble with Checking out Potential Employees on the Internet

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I made the mistake again of Googling my true name.  AUGH…the Internet presence of my name clones is growing and most of them are up to no good in terms of job seeking.  I’m VERY frustrated because how is an employer to know which person I am and are potential employers stupid enough to believe that names are unique.  I’ve written about this topic before, but now that it could affect my ability to keep my roof above my head, I feel a certain sense of urgency on the matter.  I do love the Internet, but how some people use it is questionable.

Giving what I’ve seen from Googling myself, I see that the Internet is, indeed, a sewage filled wasteland.  There’s are some people who are up to things that may be objectionable to employers all sharing my name and all very active on the Internet.  What’s a dull engineer like me to do to reclaim my identity and assert my dull, non-controversial self as a safe hire?  Do I put on my resume that I’m the “dull engineer” with patents and not these other folks?  How many job opportunities have passed me by because a potential employer Googled my name and found other people with the same name and then decided that I was unemployable based on prejudice and bias towards my name clones?

It is my belief that the Internet is not a reliable source of information about the personality or activities of a person.  Googling a name is pointless because there are many people on this Earth with the same name.  If a person explicitly gives you Internet URLs to check out, then I think it’s safe to say that is their Internet presence, or at least the Internet presence they want to feature as a potential employee.  I know I could shout this to the wind and get laws passed outlawing Google as a tool for hiring and, regardless, people are still going to be curious and do an Internet search.  However, keep in mind, that you REALLY have no idea what you’ve found and that you may be missing an opportunity to hire a great employee by “interviewing” the Internet, rather than the actual person who applied.

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communication

Twitter to Verify Celebrity Tweets

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Twitter says it will start experimenting with verifying the Twitter accounts of renown people and agencies according to an article from CNET.  (Here’s a link.)  Well, that’s a relief.  Does this mean if a person has the same name as a renown person they are SOL in terms of being able to use the name on Twitter?  Hahaha!!!  Somebody is already sitting on my real name and this person sends no Tweets, but follows “feministnews”. (And people wonder why most people use handles and avatars …)  But getting “down” to us unremarkable people; we have bullies, mean people, and name sharers, who ruin our existences too.  Going back to the time I Googled my true name and found two other name sharers who write about things and have personal identities that I don’t want to be associated with because they could be an impediment to my professional life.  Sometimes I wonder how many job interview opportunities I’ve been been denied out-the-shoot because someone Googled my true name and found online identifies or pictures of name sharers that looked unappealing.  Sometimes I feel like changing my name to kuroneko003 so people can find the real me online.  It’s too messed up.

Anyhow, all of this has me thinking about magic lore and how magic users hide their true names because a name is a very powerful piece of information that can be used to manipulate a person, and even kill a person.  I guess this lore arose from reality long ago and still holds true today.  Your true name can be used against you, so best guard it and hide behind an avatar.

Advertising, communication, self publishing

Fun Stuff Coming out of NAA Conference

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I’ve been following the news coming out of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) conference.  Here’s a link to latest thread as Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt adds his 2-cents.  Basically the newspapers have discovered that “free” isn’t a business model while, at the same time, they have no idea how to regain control of the distribution of their content from the millions of bloggers and aggregators out there in the world.  The thing I don’t understand is why they object to bloggers and aggregators providing links to their content and why they are acting like the music industry folks and “hating” upon their customers.  First of all links are the life’s blood of the internet.  If you want people to find your content, then links to your content  (along with quality content) will help put your content on top of the Google stack (links are the Internet’s “street cred”).   What news agencies don’t want is bloggers and aggregators reprinting content in whole without crediting or linking back to the source.

Let’s take a look at my interaction with Ad Age.  I pay a subscription to Ad Age because I find the content compelling.  I ended up getting a subscription because of links from the CEA news aggregator.  Some Ad Age articles are free, but not all of them.  I wanted access to this news so I pay for it.  What a concept!  In my blogging I put links to Ad Age in them and if my readers want to read the Ad Age source they can choose to pay and read the source article.   Mind blowing isn’t it?  So what’s the secret?  Um … it’s called compelling content!

So with respect to bloggers, news agencies want them to find their content.   News agencies want bloggers to pay to read content and then repackage the headlines so they compel their readers to follow the links back to the source.  Those readers, then, will be confronted with the choice to pay to read further.  So my message to the news agencies is that they should show some love to bloggers rather than “hating” upon them.  Most people like their news pre-digested and spoon fed to them.  Get used to it!  Understand who it is that wants to get beyond the headlines and serve that audience.  Quit worrying about the masses for which the “cesspool” of the Internet and headlines are good enough.  Let the bloggers and the aggregators have the close relationship with the masses — use them as envoys.   I think Eric Schmidt got it right by telling the news agency execs and reps,

These are ultimately consumer businesses, and if you piss off enough of them, you ultimately won’t have any.