If you've been looking for a new job or looking to hire a skilled web professional you may have come across Authentic Jobs. You may also have noticed that there have been Authentic Jobs listings on this site for some time.

The news is that now anyone can display job listings on their site. You can also make some money when someone you refer posts a listing on Authentic Jobs.

To display job listings you will need to apply for an Authentic Jobs API key, and once you have that you can start doing all sorts of with the job listing data. Find more details on that in The Authentic Jobs API Documentation.

Even if you don't want to display job listings you can become an affiliate by applying for The Authentic Jobs Affiliate Program. Once you're approved you will get a personal code that you can use when referring people to Authentic Jobs. For each new full-time listing posted as a result of your referral you will get USD 75, and for each freelance listing your award will be USD 25.

If you're completely new to Authentic Jobs, it is 'a targeted destination for standards-aware designers and developers and the companies seeking to hire them.' In other words, it is a place where companies looking for modern web professionals can find talent.

Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites.

Posted in Job openings.

Paul Graham's earlier work pissed off a lotta product pushers. His latest clarifies, and thus I can enter this meme on the after schock.

Eric Sink duly noted, (to paraphrase liberally), that it's probably a bad idea to hire a zealout. Yes, I said zealout, he didn't. He said hire a profesional, and I think the moral of the story is, when remotely possible, to hire a hacker who is a professional. Hopefull those who read his article will read more than the last paragraph, and thus not conclude that hackers cannot be professionals.

Then what is a profesional hacker? (cue music) Passionate, but not militant. Expressive, but not zealous. Aggressive, yet adaptive. Smart, yet empathetic. Able to type-cast, yet dynamic. Can follow procedures, yet functional. Uses source control and bug trackers but makes it PERTy only when necessary. Results and collaboration. And finally: Proud, and not condescending.

Yes, I lean towards Eric's perspective yet have been influenced by more respectable (and just plain cool) hackers in my life to let potential short-sighted conclusions go unnoticed. Tact is a necesity and will go a long way. I've met as many tactless hacker consultants as I have smug 'GPL is leprosy!' bandwagoners (sometimes both!) and since they both negate each other out of existance I'm (profesionally!) content with a product-shop wife with a hacker mistress.* I admit to having read the Great Hackers through nolstalgic eyes and generally feel most product-shops miss the point in regards to leveraging the hacker identity. My guesstimate would be that they only go as far as ThinkGeek, or worse, Despair.com. Frankly I find the term hacker about as saturated and misused as engineer. Funny how both hackers and shop-grinders like to be recognized for what they contributed to the community. 1:46AM. I digress.

*Wish I could remember the Pythonista who said 'Java is my wife, Python is my mistress' in some comment thread...here it is. Values of Cool, indeed.

Perhaps I should add a link to the Slashdot comments, but I've found Slashdot's Read More... considerabley harmful.

For those wondering about the title, I enjoyed this book. Not that it exemplifies tact, and too bad G and J are only phonetically similar, but I'll stick with it. I wonder if Vonnegut is required reading for Comp. Sci. majors. It would likely get read, but would it help?

Google Inc. plans to open a new facility in the Ann Arbor area and hire 1,000 workers there over the next five years, company and state officials said. Link to Woodtv.com

It seems everyone already forgot Italy won the World-Cup final and is mostly discussing what exactly transpired between Materazzi and Zidane. Various media outlets even went so far to hire speech-readers. As a very experience speech-reader, I can tell you, speech-reading off the TV is highly unreliable, especially if the speech-reader doesn't know the language, and does not provide verifiable data. No wonder the suggested dialogues differ wildly (source, via B12Partners). The point is still that Zidane should have known better than to start yapping with Materazzi, then flipping out like that.

Moving on.

Technorati Tags: headbutt, materazzi, world cup, zidane

Hey Folks -

Just a quick announcement.

As of today, Boyink Interactive will no longer be providing quotes for church website projects.

This decision comes after much deliberation and realizing that in six years of being in business I have talked with literally dozens of churches and have only ended up doing one site.

One.

As conversion rates go, that’s abysmal.  And not at all what my experience has been for projects coming out of the business world where my success rate is much higher.

And yes - it usually boils down to an issue of price.  I’m just not able to build sites with the level of design, content and functionality that churches are after for the budgets that I’m seeing churches come in with. 

Don’t get me wrong - I still have a passion for seeing the big “C” Church use the web in better ways than in the past.  But it’s clear that the way for me to have the most influence on getting the Church there isn’t to build better websites for a large number of (little “c') churches.  So rather than attempting to hire myself out to find fish for churches, I’m going to focus on teaching to fish instead—which currently will be through the Building a Church Site on ExpressionEngine series on Train-ee.com.

If you represent a church and are seeking a web designer or developer, I’d suggest registering and posting in the Godbit Forums for some leads on help.

The final afternoon of the Business Leadership Forum focused on the big picture -- of both global political factors and technology. A panel included Karl-Heinz Grasser, Federal Minister of Finance for the Republic of Austria. He spoke about how governments can not only avoid being an obstacle to innovation and growth but also encourage competition thereby creating more jobs. The panel was bullish about how the information revolution -- ushered in by the microprocessor in the early 1970's and the Internet of the 1990's -- has led to an explosion of new products and new business models, However, there was a consensus that retaliation from poor economies and over-regulation by some countries could stymie the growth. 

Mario Monti, President of Bocconi University and commissioner in the European Union for ten years, was quite optimistic about the EU -- a market of 480 million people -- and said that the EU itself is an innovation. He said that Europe is much more like the U.S. than it was. It is now a single market, has a single currency, and has been expanding market reach around the world. The shortcoming is that Europe, unlike America, does not yet have a constitution. This results in an economic disadvantage because the European community can not make a decision for the total. The European economy is not innovating quickly enough and in fact some countries are protecting the past at the expense of the future. Mario says it is time for "naming and shaming" the laggards through peer reviews. Then he got more specific -- "Germany, France, and Italy are behind on liberalization of service markets and have resisted initiatives to increase competition". These three countries will have a negative impact on the Euro which in turn will hurt the rest of Europe. Mr. Monti's presentation was sobering but hopeful. He said the EU has a lot of good features, that it can protect intellectual property but also move against monopolies such as Microsoft. The key to get innovation going in Europe is for the EU to innovate itself by completing it's constitution.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger kicked off the final segment of the forum, which focused on the future. IBM supports Linux because it is a great operating system for computers. Irving introduced Linus Torvalds the developer of Linux which he published as a student in 1991. Don Tapscott, a widely acclaimed author, who invented the term "paradigm shift", then moderated the final panel which included Linus, Nick Donofrio, executive vice president for innovation and technology at IBM, and Ann Mettler, executive director and co-founder of The Lisbon Council. It was a wide-ranging discussion. Linus is an incredibly humble guy. He said he has no vision, just looks 5 cm ahead before each step, and loves to solve technical problems. Linux is successful, he says, because both the development and the decision making are distributed -- a "built-in meritocracy". Don asked why volunteers worked on Linux for no economic return. Linus said, "if you were all engineers, you would not be asking that question". Open source software is viable in most all software areas, with the only exception being niche markets which are too small to get adequate collaboration. "Open source will take over most all infrastructure".

Ann said there is a huge gap between businesses which are moving ahead rapidly and societies which feel left behind. The key problem is that the economy is 70% services but the regulations and governance are still based on an industrial model. She believes that government should learn how to innovate from businesses. "Politicians are clueless about the discussion of the past day and a half". She says that businesses need to share their leanings with society. The labor market in Europe is flat because companies do not want to hire and that is because the laws are so onerous. "You can hire but you can't fire". Labor reform is needed desperately.

Nick says' It' s all about change". IBM is doing a balancing act by supporting both open things and proprietary things. The company is generating a lot of patents but also giving away a lot of patents to move the ball forward in key markets such as healthcare and education. "The world can move ahead faster if the OS is Linux -- it is good enough and a "blow for freedom". A California venture capitalist asked about business ethics and Nick was very aggressive in his response saying it was not optional for companies to be totally and completely ethical in every respect. (Having been at IBM for 38 years, I can say I never ever had a  concern about ethics at the company). Nick summarized that anyone can innovate if they are willing to change. "If nothing changes, nothing changes". Sam wrapped up the conference by saying corporations need to be transparent. Their ultimate responsibility is to create value for the constituencies: stockholders, customers, employees. He walks the talk.  

Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories
Index to Roman Rendezvous stories

The journalism industry, in all its worry over its place in the digital age, seems too willing to “commit suicide out of a fear of dying” and seemingly latches onto anything it thinks might increase user engagement and/or page views.

At the recent Online News Association conference, the entire place was filled with “MSM”-types buzzing about “UGC.”

Those implementing it were eagerly doling out advice; “It’s wonderful,” they seemed to preach. “It’s revolutionary!” (Ironically, there was also a session explaining how to keep the annoying people from participating).

Job postings for Site UGC Editors abounded.

The sense was as though the industry thought it finally has this “Web” thing figured out.

But, as the IHT’s Mike Oreskes said in his keynote to the conference, journalists need to help audiences with information overload and not just become conveyor belts.

The online news industry needs to realize mainstream media has always about aggregation. The New York Times prides itself by claiming that it only publishes the “news that’s fit to print.” Online news needs to confidently embrace this role by filtering out, again as Oreskes said, the wheat from the chaff.

If a news site can present its readers, alongside the pure news, a distillation of the best of the rest of the Web by properly using the tools of the new Web surprising things could happen: news outlets might once again been viewed with the kind of authority they once had.

But first the industry needs to remember, technology won’t save the day.

During his presentation at the recent conference, Adrian Holovaty was asked repeatedly about what tools a news organization can use to collect and refine data for features like “Faces of the Fallen.” His answer?

“Hire a reporter.”