Blog.Lejer.Ro – Bloggers Heaven

There’s a real interesting point of view, from Jim Durbin:

Jobster, the owner of Recruiting.com, has decided that rather than compete in the online employment space, they’re going to try to shut down Recruitingblogs.com, the new site started by Jason Davis.

Last Thursday, I received a letter from Lawyers representing Jobster letting me know I had to shut down RecruitingBlogs.com immediately or Jobster would take action. They say that RecruitingBlogs.com is causing damage to their business and that I am in violation of my non compete.

For those not aware, Jason Davis was the founder of Recruiting.com (I was one of his writers, added later in the process), and he sold the property to Jobster last Spring. When it happened, everyone was full of excitement that Jobster, who in our minds was the first Web 2.0 employment company, was going to take Recruiting.com and build on its success.

Jason worked for Jobster for a year on contract, a year that saw Recruiting.com turn from a group recruting blog to a Digg-type site. Users could submit stories, and readers would vote on them. The site was given very little attention from Jobster, and improvements were rare, so when Jobster decided that it wasn’t worth it to renew the contract on the same terms, they brought on John Sumser of Interbiznet.com to run the place.

Cue the evil music.

John is a well-known industry figure, but he spent the months before taking the reins bashing bloggers in general, but specifically calling out the people who kept the recruiting community vibrant. In other words – he trashed his users – repeatedly.

John has been at it a couple of months now, and traffic has been plummeting. It’s been falling from its peak since December, but it’s gotten worse since John came aboard. An unofficial boycott, created by people like me who stopped submitting, commenting, or reading Recruiting.com when John came aboard, is the most likely reason. We protested his arrogance and his insulting words

But that’s not how Jobster and Jason Goldberg see it. The failure of Recruiting.com is a failure of Jobster and their staff to use the website correctly. So what is the answer? Do they ask for help? Do they reach out to the people who were responsible to the success in the first place? Do they apologize?

Nope. They try to sue Jason Davis – sending a Cease and Desist Letter to him, when only the most twisted and torturous logic would show how Jason’s not-for-profit community built on a Ning platform is damaging the Recruiting.com website.

Well, they just made a huge mistake. Wait until Ning, a darling in the Web 2.0 space, finds out one of their communities is being sued because they compete with a company that has $50 million in venture capital. It’s the perfect moment for Ning.

Their social networking platform is so powerful, companies feel the need to sue to prevent Ning-sites from competing with large companies.

Read articles related to that issue:
Original: http://www.stlrecruiting.com/2007/06/breaking-news-j.html
and
another: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/26/more-drama-for-jobster/

Google on Monday called on a judge to extend part of the US government’s four-year antitrust scrutiny of Microsoft, intensifying a lobbying battle in which the arch-rivals have sought to limit each other’s power.

In an unusual legal manoeuvre, Google went over the heads of justice department and state regulators to appeal directly to a federal judge to impose greater restrictions on the software company. However, Microsoft’s lawyers claimed the approach was part of an untested procedure that fell outside the judge’s remit.

Google’s intervention follows Microsoft’s appeal to the Federal Trade Commission in April to block its rival’s planned purchase of advertising technology company DoubleClick .

Monday’s legal challenge concerns software that people use to find information stored on their PCs by typing a word or phrase into a search box. Such software, made by both Microsoft and Google as well as other companies, is expected to assume increasing importance as people store more of their personal information on the web as well as on their computers.

Quick background: In April, Google sent a 50-page white paper to the US Department of Justice asserting that Microsoft was violating its 2002 antitrust settlement by not allowing outside desktop search engines (such as Google’s own Desktop Search application) to be installed in Windows Vista. Microsoft initially denied the claims, saying that users could indeed use Google’s application instead of their own, if not very easily, and assistant attorney general Thomas O. Barnett sided with the Redmond camp, writing a letter to state attorneys asking them to drop their investigations.

Then last week Microsoft agreed to make changes to the search application in Vista that would make it easier for consumers to install an outside default desktop search program. Google, however, wasn’t impressed. Monday, the search giant appealed directly to a federal judge saying that Microsoft had not done enough to mitigate their concerns.

Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association of Competitive Technology, called the intervention by Google a “PR stunt” (though as the Financial Times notes, his group generally sides with Microsoft), and I tend to agree. The Justice Department had already reviewed and dismissed Google’s complaint, and Microsoft had agreed to make concessions in an attempt to appease Google.

Read full article at Read/WriteWeb.com

According to recent Compete data, digg has overtaken Facebook in number of unique visitors and has grown 1400% in one year. Compete’s May 2007 data states that digg had 22.6 Million unique visitors, while Facebook had 20.2 Million. Facebook still has many more page views, 11 Billion to digg’s 250 Million – which says that Facebook’s site is far ’stickier’. But the unique visitors stat is significant, as it suggests that more people visit digg than Facebook.
Read full article written by Richard MacManus from here, it really worth it.

Veoh today unveiled a serious challenger in the Web TV market. VeohTV Beta is being subtly billed as a “Joost Killer”.

Veoh’s been busy. In addition to running its popular video sharing site, which is known for higher-quality streams (in terms of bitrate), they’ve announced VeohTV, which is best described as a distributed Joost.

The service, which involves, like Joost and Babelgum, downloading new software which becomes a sort of “video browser.” But instead of doing deals with content providers and piping content directly to users, VeohTV is letting users pull content from around the web – a “single interface to search, browse and view all video on the Internet.” Accepting that IPTV will be decentralized is the same theme driving Truveo’s success, AOL’s video search tool.

Basically, if its out there on the Internet, and Veoh can pull it in, you can watch it. Veoh says this is great for video sites, since they can continue to embed advertising, etc with the content.

Will it work? It certainly might. I’ll have to wait and try out the software first. But the vision is solid. This avoids the time and cost of doing licensing deals with content owners. Like Real’s new player that allows users to basically bookmark and locally store video, it assumes that video will continue to be widely distributed across the Internet. Whoever creates the best interface for the content will win users, and liquidity events.

This also spells eventual trouble for online TV guides like Meevee (not to single them out). If people have a tv and its hooked up to a computer, as more and more people do, they’ll eventually expect video on demand from the Internet. The online TV guides weren’t able to figure out how to bring this content to them, and now services like Veoh, Joost, Babelgum and others have just done an end-around.

Meanwhile, don’t forget the social aspect of watching TV, and how the Internet can help facilitate that. BuddyTV is a service to keep an eye on. No IPTV, but lots of chatting going on during shows from loyal users.

Read full article (including screenshots) here.

A must read article:

Less than 12 hours after we posted our review of the Web Office Suite space, Google has seemingly put the last piece of the jigsaw in place for their suite. Today Google announced it has acquired the assets of Zenter, “a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations.” This technology will be added to Tonic Systems, a technology for presentation creation and document conversion. Tonic Systems was acquired in April by Google. Nick Gonzalez says that “Zenter was focusing on the front end of the application, as well as community/sharing features”, so it will be a nice complement to Tonic.

Prior to the acquisition, Zenter’s homepage noted it was “preparing for private beta” and it had the usual email form for interested beta testers to fill out. They were also looking for people with “serious JavaScript and/or Java programming skills”.

So it is likely that Presentations capability will be added to Google Docs & Spreadsheets soon (meaning Google will have to re-think the name for that product!). As GigaOm notes, Google still needs to work on its overall product integration – i.e. making it a true suite offering – and the UI/brand needs work too.

Google Apps at this point is a fairly higgelty-piggelty product offering, as indeed is its closest suite competitor Zoho. Both have plenty of Web Office apps, but there is nothing from either company that jumps out and says “I’m a Suite!”. Therefore both Google and Zoho have a ways to go to compete with Microsoft Office.

Read full article here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_acquires_zenter.php