We’re up to 14 members at the moment including recent and notable additions; Glenn Gutmacher, Michael Marlatt, Marvin Smith, Amitai Givertz, Ritesh Nair, Julian Sanchez, Barry Deutsch, Kumar App and Mark Grey.

See the link at the bottom to join.

Maltego
The evolution of people search. Maltego takes people search and information graphing to a new level. This one feels like one of those tools thats on or leading the edge of the next big thing.
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

Tools to analyze Del.icio.us Tags
Search Engine Journal article on tools for Delicious tags.
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

The Conversation Prism on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Web 2.0 Conversation Prism by Brian Solis
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

Social Networks Site Usage: Visitors, Members, Page Views, and Engagement by the Numbers in 2008
Ton’s of usage statistics relating to some of the most popular social sites for 2008.
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

Flickr Photo Download: Social Media Landscape
Social Media Landscape Map by Fred Cavazza.
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

Interactive Applicant
InteractiveApplicant.com – a better way to recruit, or more of the same?
Bookmarked by Michael Marlatt

List of Social News Sites by TechCruch – 3/2007
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

Facebook shares some stats….check it out:
By Michael Marlatt

Cool Social Web 2.0 Tools & Applications
Web 2.0 tools and reviews
Bookmarked by Charles Bretz

Who do you implu? – www.implu.com
IMPLU aggregates news and announcements relative to executive talent. Looks to be a good resource for research on this topic.
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

JibberJobber Blog » Blog Archive » 10 Free Job Search Resources Online
Top 10 Frees Job Search Resources. From a different perspective than recruiting but still interesting.
Bookmarked by Robert Hoefer

Now You’ve Seen Everything | Shannon Whitley
Twitter client in Excel. No kidding. Picture Tweetdeck or Twhirl, but in excel. I wonder if this would help in tracking twitter topics or people?
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

“Voicemail Surfing” A Comprehensive Guide on Using Voicemail to Circumvent Gatekeepers
By Amitai Givertz

Bookmark & Share – The Power of the Button™ | OnlyWire
Another step towards “write once, post everywhere”, helping to cure SNF, one service at a time. I guess the question is, do too many distribution services start to contribute to SNF? Nice irony there.
Bookmarked by Joshua Kahn

WidSets -get your favorite web content straight to your mobile phone…

Michael Marlatt

The rest of Find+Attract group favorite links are here. The group is open so anyone can join from there.

If you like this article twitter it with this URL:

http://budurl.com/l92j

and your message will be automagically added as a comment below.

Ok, Chatcatcher hasn’t gotten the same publicity as the first two. Also, Shannon Whitley, (@swhitley) Chatcatcher’s creator isn’t an online giant on the order of the first two. However, stay with me here, there’s a good reason I include Chatcatcher in the same sentence.

The first two facilitate site integration with two of the most popular platforms for a person’s online identity, Facebook and Google. Chatcatcher facilitates integration with a third, Twitter (and actually a fourth and fifth because it works with FriendFeed and Identi.ca too.) I would say Twitter, and microblogs in general are fast becoming as relevant as the first two, and probably in some ways more relevant than Google profiles. Up until now, there wasn’t a good way to integrate the microblogging community with your blog or site. Sure you could push your own Twitter updates to a widget on your site, but really couldn’t allow for Twitter-user initiated interaction.

This brings us to Chatcatcher. For my recruiting and sourcing friends, bear with me this is relevant to you.

Here’s the gist. Someone posts a tweet about a blog post or site article of yours. They include a link to that post, either the full URL, or a shortened version. Chatcatcher sees it, and auto-magically posts it as a comment or trackback to that post on your site.

Here’s the rub.

1. Chatcatcher provides a clickable link to the twitter handle of the person tweeting about your post.

2. No matter what URL shortening service is used, Chatcatcher grabs it.

3. Chatcatcher is compatible with one of the best comments plugins Disqus.

4. Avatars are present in the Chatcatcher comments.

5. Chatcatcher also provides you the ability to track Chatcatcher comment totals and grab an RSS feed of all the people referencing your site in twitter.

6. Chatcatcher works with FriendFeed (and now Identi.ca) as well.

7. Setting up Chatcatcher is fairly simple. Trust me on this, I’m no developer and I got it figured out. Plus, Shannon Whitley is extremely responsive and helpful. He created a wordpress plug-in for us Wordpress users, and also a script for non-wordpress sites. (Quick tidbit: I knew this guy was smart when I found out he created a Twitter client in MS Excel. No kidding.)

Here’s why all of the above is good.

1. Previously, Tweets about your site were not connected to your site in any way, unless you somehow manually did it.

2. Now, the folks who tweet about your site, and ReTweet about your site, and the regular commenters on your posts can see each other, on your post. This is the really cool part.

Simply put, it re-connects the conversation to the source of the topic, and facilitates connection amongst the people discussing. Put another way, it brings the twitter, friendfeed, or Identi.ca conversation and co-locates it on your site, which is what stimulated the discussion in the first place.

There are other apps that attempt the same thing as Chatcatcher, but Chatcatcher is the best for all the reasons I mention above. See below for how it works.

So, recruiting and sourcing friends. Tell me your thoughts, why is this relevant to what we do? I have my own ideas, but I’d prefer to hear yours.

Don’t forget, if you want to contribute to this, just join the
Find+Attract Diigo Group and share your bookmarks to the group. Everything else happens automatically (with a little formatting help from me).

Here’s who’s contributing as of the last bookmarking date on this digest:

Robert Hoefer: Robert sources with Accenture, he’s a colleague and friend.

Charles Bretz: Charles sources with CDW Corporation. I know him via the web, smart guy, great sourcer.

Erica Steffenson: Erica recently was affected by the downturn, formerly a sourcer with Ecolab, she’s now looking. She’s good too, send her a message via Twitter if you have something.

Suzy Tonini: Suzy works for Deloitte, and is a former winner of a SourceCon Challenge.

Here’s what we’re bookmarking:

Go2Web20.net – The complete Web 2.0 sites directory
By Charles Bretz

Retweetradar – Finding trends in the mountains of information ‘retweet’ed on Twitter.
another winner by Ben Hedrington

HOW TO 2008: How To Do Almost Anything With Social Media
Nuff Said.
By Joshua Kahn

Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche – ReadWriteWeb
looking for impact people in a niche industry? RWW compares a number of ways to search for influential blogs by niche. Useful to sourcers? Most definitely.
By Joshua Kahn

Mobvis
The subject of a recent RWW article entitled “hyperlinking the real world”. Very interesting phenomenon. I think this is the next stage of the web, and mobile, helping uncover the connections that are there in our lives already, but invisible to us.
By Joshua Kahn

Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2008: Social Media, SEO, and More » techipedia | tamar weinberg
This is an incredibly comprehensive look back at articles from last year on all the tools us web denizens use. Lot’s of amazing gems here. The articles are relevant over the long term as well.
By Joshua Kahn

7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media
Post on Mashable by personal branding dude Dan Schwabel. Timely methinks.
By Joshua Kahn

Managing young workers in the downturn | Generation Y goes to work | The Economist
Interesting article on how companies are using net gen to weather the storm. Best Buy, Estee Lauder and others are featured here.
By Joshua Kahn

Tweetbacks Beta | Dan Zarrella
incredibly good idea for mapping retweets of your blog posts. Still in beta, but already is getting near viral attention.
By Joshua Kahn
PS- Look also at ChatCatcher by Shannon Whitley @swhitley since the time when I bookmarked this, I have tested both Tweetbacks and Chatcatcher. You’ll notice I’m using Chatcatcher. Look for an extended post comparing the two.

CEOExpress Business portal for executives created by a CEO
Good research tool.
By Charles Bretz

ASAE and The Center for Association Leadership – People & Groups – Associations
Directory of over 6600 associations. Searchable by name, category, city and state.
Good research tool.
By Charles Bretz

ScreenToaster – Free online screen recorder: create screencasts, tutorials and reviews in a few clicks
uh-oh, Jing from Techsmith has some competition. I tried it, and its easier to use than Jing. Same basic functionality it seems, plus I can put my screencasts on Youtube, if I want. Oh yeah, and its free. Update: after more testing, there are still some kinks to work out with this. I had some trouble uploading my screencast, and audio is a bit squicky still. Advantage still goes to Jing.
By Joshua Kahn

The Resumator instantly improves how you collect resumes and advertise jobs
another app similar to ‘choosy’ that collects resumes in one place. I’m going to try this one next week.
By Joshua Kahn

How Choosy Works | Choosy
interesting new take on collecting resumes from multiple job postings.
By Joshua Kahn

Future of Work: Scoble’s Social Strategy for Finding a Job | PSFK
Enough said, PSFK, Scoble, just go read it already.
By Robert Hoefer

Social Networks Site Usage: Visitors, Members, Page Views, and Engagement by the Numbers in 200
ton’s of usage statistics relating to some of the most popular social sites for 2008. – By Joshua Kahn

Posted from Diigo. To see, subscribe, and/or contribute go to the Find+Attract Diigo Group

1. Save time by automating manual stuff, or taking advantage of work I’m already doing.

2. The tool or mashup has to be easy and quick to use. One or two clicks, less than 30 seconds.

3. Foster real connection, collaboration and participation.

Now Diigo has added another reason to love them, integration with Wordpress, (and other blogging platforms).

Why should you care?

In December I opened a group in Diigo as an offshoot of this blog. The group is open to anyone to join. Its purpose is to bookmark anything found on line related to sourcing, recruiting, staffing, talent management, employment branding, or tools for any of the above.

So as I do my usual work of discovery via Twitter, my RSS reader, alerts I’ve set up or just browsing, I’m bookmarking these things to the find+attract diigo group. I’ve set up Diigo to publish a draft to my blog of the weekly bookmarking activity in the group. On Mondays, I’ll review the draft post and publish it.

So if you’re an active Diigo user you can contribute to the content that gets posted on Find+Attract.

If you’re not an active user, but just want to browse the bookmarks of people in the sourcing and recruiting industry, just follow along on my blog.

Either way, I hope its useful to you. As always, tell me if its not.

Right now the “group” consists of myself and Charles Bretz. Thanks Charles!

If you want to join, just go to http://groups.diigo.com/groups/find_attract to do so.

Let me know via comments on this post if you have any questions.

Below are some bookmarks from the group so far.

• Dapp Factory

  Tags: rss, feed, tools, mashup

• All Facebook – The Unofficial Facebook Blog – Facebook News and More!

  Tags: facebook, allfacebook, social, news, blog

• Social Media Monitoring Tools | Online Reputation Monitoring | Trackur.com

  Tags: reputation, trackur, socialmedia, trackur.com, analytics, tracking, Tools

• Zapproved.com

  Tags: collaboration, workflow, zapproved, web2.0, approval

  • group decision making tool – By Joshua Kahn

• Twitter Grader | Score Your Profile

  Tags: social, twitter, web2.0, grader, twitter grader, tools

• cli.gs: Short URLs with analytics

  Tags: url, tools, web2.0, statistics, analytics, tracking

• The Customer is the Company — Threadless — User Innovation

  threadless is the epitome of the new business models that have a strong attract factor. Great example of crowd sourcing, innovation.

  Tags: threadless, attract, open, innovation

• Twitter Strategy | Social Media Strategy | Jesse Liebman

  Tags: liebman, twitter

  • great bit on using twitter – By Joshua Kahn

• Avature | Global Recruiting Services

  Tags: avature, crm

• 99 Awesome Adobe AIR Apps for Productivity

  Tags: productivity, apps

The rest of Find+Attract group favorite links are here.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

When these things happen, that are largely out of our individual control, its easy to stress out, get down, lose faith, and complain a lot. You could do any or all of those.

Or you could look for opportunity.

Call me crazy, but I think times like these are among the best times for you to have the greatest impact on your career. All thats required is equanimity, attention, and a few tools. What follows are my reasons why these are good times for your own personal career innovation, and what you can do about it.

Leeway, Openness to Ideas, Accessibility – why now is a good time for some career innovation

In bad times, there is often more leeway given for people to talk about the bad times. Granted this is not always true, but generally people are given the chance to talk with their managers, with their peers, or in organizational meetings. Take this as an opportunity for reflection on what you really want from your career. You have more freedom now to be bold, go for your ideals, and explore things you’ve always wanted to explore.

Often, executives, managers, decision-makers and “people in charge” of your destiny are a lot more accessible and physically present. Depends on the company, but generally they feel bad about the bad news, and unless they work for AIG, they really care about what happens to the company and its people – you. They are therefore more approachable, and open to meeting.

The decision makers are likely grasping for ideas and solutions themselves, thus they are more open to new ideas, or a fresh approach that may help them solve their problems.

Given that the chess board is laid out this way, now set your game plan, and execute.

Career Innovation Map

Map out, literally, what you want and all your current options for getting there. I’m a huge advocate for mindmapping to graphically represent complex sets of interactions and get some clarity. Doesn’t matter if you use Mindomo, Freemind, Mindmeister, or paper and pen. Take a quick look at this demo of mindmapping then do one with yourself as the central theme. The idea here is to map out all the potential career scenarios that could come your way. Its also a place to document areas in each scenario for you to have impact. This is a career wish-list of sorts, so be bold. Put you in the middle of the map, and each branch is a potential scenario for where you could take your career. This is an exercise in being expansive and innovative in thinking about your professional life. In my experience you end up with a lot more options than you thought you had. Plus, you can more easily identify the logical steps necessary to carry out each option. Now you’ll be ready to act no matter what ends up happening.

Update your personal brand

If you’re not sure what I mean by ‘personal brand’, do yourself a favor and check these guys out. Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Dan Schwabel, and Seth Godin. They all understand the direct impact of what you say and do, on you. Even better they clearly lay out options for actions you can take now.

If you don’t have time to go to each of their sites now (be sure and do it later) and flip through this slideshare by Dan Schwabel. Even a cursory run through will paint a picture for you of what personal branding is and what you can start to do about it.

| View | Upload your own

Personal brand is something you are always impacting whether you’re aware of it or not. Now is your chance to be more intentional and more visible. Here’s some tools to help.

VisualCV: this site allows you to have a media rich resume online for free. VisualCV is indexed by Google (therefore findable), and easily shareable via a unique URL, like this Visualcv.com/joshuakahn
Some other nice features are that you can display your work visually, with links, and images. You can also share your VisualCV via URLs, direct email, and can track how many have seen your ‘public’ CV. The site also allows you view/save your resume in PDF form with one click. Emurse.com is another popular option with similar features. Zolio is on the scene now in beta but is still building features.

LinkedIN, Facebook: I’m always amazed at how many LinkedIN profiles I see that are woefully incomplete. Look through some of these articles on getting the most out of LinkedIN and follow the advice there. In short, get your profile to 100%, link any of your sites there, display your email and be open to networking.

Twitter: There probably not a more central tool for getting out a message. The beauty of Twitter is that you can use it to communicate to people in Twitter and outside of Twitter. Most social networks have a “status update” or allow you to display an RSS feed to your connections in that network. This allows you to use Twitter to communicate to all your networks at once. If you really want to get funky with this “write once, post everywhere” theme, check out ping.fm.

Social Networks in general: If you’re like me, you probably have a long list of social networks that at one point or another you’ve checked out. You might be more or less active in these, but I would encourage you to go to each one and make your profiles and pictures consistent across all of them. In each one, where you can, include the links to your LinkedIN profile, Twitter handle, or other sites of yours. You don’t have to be real active in each of these places, but you can still automatically push your communications into each area.

Execute your plan

Now that you have your scenarios and career wishlist mapped, and your personal brand content and communication structure set up, take some action.

Remember how those “people in charge” are more accessible now? When an executive says, “if you have any questions or concerns about the current situation, my door is open” that’s your cue. Set meetings with those directly responsible or even dotted line responsible for your career. Bring your career innovation plan. Present it as, “in case you were wondering what to do with me”.  Be honest, be bold, tell them what you could do to help, ask for what you want.

Best case: they take your ideas, note your initiative, and your risk pays off. You get what you want, or something close to it. Bottom line, you’ve had an impact on the direction of your career.

Worst case: they are restricted by circumstances and can’t help you directly.  However, you have a hopefully honest assessment of your place in the organization currently from someone you may not generally have access to, and you are now perfectly prepared for investigating opportunity elsewhere.

The gist of his post was “be careful who you idolize” in the recruiting world. Definitely something to keep in mind if you’re an avid consumer of recruiting/sourcing (or any) blogs. I guess I just wanted to expand a bit on that theme with a related, if somewhat tangential topic.

The stuff I write about, and train people on internal to my company, or share externally at networking events is all my particular take on a given technique or approach to sourcing. I do my best to write from my experience and hopefully the stuff I put out is useful to you. If not, why are you here?! Unsubscribe right away! Well, tell me it stinks, then unsubscribe.

Too often a vendor, or individual or company will hail some sourcing doodad as the answer to all your problems. This is almost never the case. The myriad factors involved in sourcing are too varied to all be tamed by one thing.

The point of all the techniques, tactics and tools that are out there is to find the most appropriate use for them, and just as important the situations when they aren’t useful.

Take what you read and test it, try other versions of it, give it a workout on your sourcing or recruiting projects. Improve on it, make it fail, take it apart, try to get at why it works or doesn’t for you. Along the way you’ll not only learn something about the machinery behind the tools tactics and techniques being offered, you’ll also teach yourself to spot BS a mile away. Be it from a vendor or self described guru.

One big challenge we have as sourcers is that we’re not generally conversant in the lingo of the people we seek. Even if we have experience sourcing talented people in a certain industry we’re still not doing the work that they do. In other words, we’re not exactly speaking the language they speak. We may know a few words, or phrases, but we don’t have context, jargon, acronyms, and syntax down pat like the prospects we seek.

Here’s a thought at how to peek into real conversations happening that may allow you to both learn the professional language of the people you seek, and find some of those people to boot.

First off is a little Google app called Spy. This app was created by a colleague of mine at Best Buy, Ben Hedrington. Ben’s a smart guy, you should follow him on twitter @benhedrington. Spy tracks content posted via Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Google Reader, Yahoo News, and Blogs (via friendfeed). In the snapshot below I entered ‘SQL’ as my keyword, and set it to look at the last 30 minutes.

Click Image to see Spy in Action

As I’m writing this its scrolling through all posts with SQL in it. I’m learning about journals, conferences, individuals, and other SQL related stuff. Oh, and I’m learning about the people that post too. A real nice way to quickly find and connect with people in an industry.

Another interesting way to use Spy is to project it on the wall during a conference or any large meeting. Assuming you have Twitter savvy people in the room and they all use a standard ‘hashtag‘ in their tweets about the meeting, you can watch the collective consciousness of the room (or anyone using the key term) displayed on the wall.

The second conversation watcher is called Monitter. I just learned of Monitter the other day from Thomas Knoll, community manager for Seesmic. Monitter allows you to watch three different keywords and their ’stream’ from Twitter, again, relatively real-time. One really cool feature of Monitter is focusing on location. The picture below shows three streams following ‘Oracle’, ‘DB2′, and ‘SQL’ within 40 miles of Reston.

Click Image to enlarge

This takes the conversation watching idea to a new level. Notice RSS is enabled here as well.

What tools are you using to understand your target industry better?

Of course this is a lot of hooey.

Allow me to state the obvious reasons why.

You can’t join and consistently use every network

You can’t use every tool, all the time ( I know, I’ve tried)

Real Value doesn’t come from more (necessarily)

The irony is that by trying to do it all, without some discrimination and mindfulness, leads to less quality connections, and less productivity, less of what you were striving for in the first place.

So if you’re job and interests require that you use these tools to be productive and effective, or if you simply want to use these tools to accomplish your goals, you end up feeling a bit stuck.

In short, you suffer from Social Network Fatigue.

If this describes you then I hope you’ll see some value in the series of posts I’m working on to solve this problem. I’ll be tailoring the content to sourcing and recruiting people specifically, but the underlying principles will be applicable regardless of industry or purpose. By the end of the series I’ll have a simple, clear list of principles and specific tactics to follow.

Step One: map out all the places the digital you exists right now. Above is an interactive example of what I mean. It’s a mindmap that I’ve created using Mindomo, a web-based, free tool. There are many other mindmapping tools out there, but I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time looking unless you are going to be a heavy mind-mapper. For this particular use, this one is just right.

Simply start entering nodes for all the places you are or want to be on line. Categorize your places if that helps you, and also show the ways these places are connected. This one isn’t the complete picture for me personally, but it illustrates the idea. Visualizing it this way accomplishes a couple things…

1. you can see in one space all the places you are, you might be surprised.

2. you can use the connector tools to visualize how your places interact with each other and how your content flows through your network. This will be key in later steps as you start to be a bit more intentional about how things are connected and how you personally interact with these sites, push your content, and connect with people.

Personally, I’m using this map on my ‘Connect‘ page here on my blog to help people decide where they’d like to connect with me. Since not everyone uses the same sites and networks, it gives them options. More on this later. For now play with the map above a bit, its interactive. You can drag it around, zoom in/out, expand/contract the branches and the links are live beneath the icons. To see the full screen, click the red M in the middle.