So it looks like I wasn’t the only idiot who couldn’t work out just what Wave was supposed to be used for (see my post here – http://tim-gregory.com/2009/11/google-wave-makes-me-feel-stupid/).
Google is gonna shut it down…
I’ve created my first Facebook group, dedicated to drumming up some support for stopping the Yellow Pages and Phonebook spam we’re subjected to every year.
I’m hoping we can get the group up to a decent number and then set a date for returning our unwanted phonebooks.
Maybe it can become an annual event until the bastards decide to ask us if we want the books first before dumping them on our doorsteps.
So go here, join the group, post it to all your friends, and let’s hatch a plan to deliver on Operation: Yellow Snow – the mass return of unwanted Yellow Pages and Phonebooks to the Trudon offices.
UPDATED:
Can you believe that the line “Please consider the environment before printing this email” was added to the mail from a Trudon employee? Should perhaps read “Please consider the environment before printing 6 million phonebooks”
I hate it when the Yellow pages gets dropped off at my house.. it usually arrives as a bundle of 2 books (the phonebook / white pages) and the Yellow pages, and they sit around the house unused until the next edition arrives.
They are massive, ugly, and for me – completely useless.
I would never page through the Yellow Pages looking for a plumber/electrician/painter/doctor/whatever, and any directory-type searches I need are done through Google and have been for years.
I don’t have it in me to simply chuck the books in the trash, and even sending them straight into the recycling seems like a complete waste.
I was peeved when I arrived home a couple of days ago to find that a new set of books had been dropped off, and they have been sitting on my dining table irritating me ever since.
I heard voices outside the house this morning and was pleased to see a couple of guys wearing high-visibility vests with a van full of telephone book, and going door-to-door to hand them out.
I rushed outside, and the conversation went something like this:
“Oh good, you’re back – I don’t need a phone book and yellow pages, please take mine back”
“Sorry sir, I can’t do that, I only distribute them, I can’t take them back”
“Why not? Give them to someone else. I haven’t used them.”
“No sir, I get paid per book I drop off, so I can’t take them back, I must hand them out”.
“So give mine away again, get paid twice”.
“No, I get paid for distributing these ones. Rather take another set from me and I’ll get paid”
“I don’t want another set. I don’t want this set either. If you won’t take mine away, I’m just going to throw them away.”
“Fine throw it away, but take another one and throw it away too so I can be paid”
“WTF???”
At this point I closed the door and put my phone books back on the table and vowed to ignore them for another year.
UPDATE: I’m clearly not the only one who hates this unsolicited dumping –
Check out http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/ and http://www.paperlesspetition.org/
I received a newsletter from Jobs.co.za this morning, and read an article linked from it called “Beware of Job scams“.
This seems to be a big problem all over the South African internet, and I know the Dealfish team use human moderators to delete thousands of scammy posts every day. I assume the same is true for Gumtree and all the others, and Careers24 is not immune from scammers either and we’re forced to keep an eye out for their appearance.
The bit that made me laugh was this line from the article:
Jobs.co.za explains that the most typical strategy used by scammers to trap Job Seekers is by posting job advertisements on websites or in the newspaper requesting CV’s to be sent.
Unfortunately, this strategy is also employed far too often by recruitment agencies, the legitimate customers of the job boards!
Some unscrupulous recruiters will load up fake jobs so they can harvest CVs for a particular industry and then contact the job seekers later with other real jobs that might not be as interesting as the fake one they have posted. Similarly, a some recruiters will load a fairly generic job ad and then repost it again and again, sometimes for years! Many of these ads link straight out to the recruiters own website for CV upload, meaning that the job board that carried the ad doesn’t get to build their user database either.
This practice is not unique to South African recruiters, nor is it limited to the recruitment industry, and it’s not uncommon for real estate agents to list houses that have already been sold so that they can do the same bait and switch – “oh, sorry, that one has just been sold, but I have another house that has just come onto the market that you should see”.
There is a growing backlash against this practice, and there are some job boards emerging to fill the gap that offer a “no recruitment agency” policy, insisting on direct employer ads only. This obviously hurts the industry as a whole, and it’s grossly unfair to the ethical recruiters and job boards who choose not to engage in this sort of policy.
One of the first pieces of advice I was given by someone previously in the industry when I joined Careers24 was to do exactly this – post my own fake job ads to grow the CV database.
I don’t think this is ethical behaviour, and I won’t be engaging in the same scam that the real criminals are trying on the job boards.
And over time I’d like to build the reputation of Careers24 for listing great jobs that really exist.
I encourage recruitment agencies to take a stand, stop taking advantage of people looking for work, and to serve the South African job-seeking market better:
- List real jobs! it’s that simple – if you want to build a great relationship with your candidates and place them again and again, don’t start out by lying to them
- Don’t create a spruced up version of a hard-to-fill job so you can do a bait-and-switch on suitable candidates
- Don’t keep refreshing generic job ads for developers or admin people so you can collect CVs from the job board and keep them in your own systems
- Do let the applicant know who you are recruiting for if at all possible – job seekers love responding to direct ads
- Don’t repost the same ad multiple times with different keywords and under different names – you’re wasting everyone’s time if the candidates write up multiple intro letters and tweak their CVs for the posts that are all for the same job
And if you do need to post an ad for a position or skills need that you think is coming up but doesn’t exist yet, please mark it as a “sourcing ad”, or “future hiring” so that candidates know exactly what they are responding to.
What do you think? Ever been stung by a fake ad or an unscrupulous job board?
24.com has launched a free Food24 Restaurant Finder iPhone app. The app is great – it lets you search or browse for restaurants, view restaurant details, click to dial the restaurant phone number, create a list of favourites, and read and post reviews and ratings from your phone.
The app is also something of a landmark development for us, as it’s the first app we’ve created using only in-house developers and designers, and it’s also the first app we’ve delivered that is tightly integrated with our CMS and search technology rather than being driven by content feeds in the same was as the News24 iPhone app.
A couple of things about the app that I think are super-cool:
- The app is integrated with our CMS platform both for reading data from the Food24 site and for posting back to the site. This means that ratings and reviews are shared between the site and the app in real-time, and if you’re sitting in a restaurant waiting hours for your food or you’ve just had the best service of your life you can share your thought immediately with anyone using the Food24 site or iPhone app. This CMS integration also lets the Food24 website editors update elements of the Food24 app like the “Featured” restaurants simply by dragging the restaurant name into a category in the CMS.
- Solr search for the restaurant search – we’re using a Solr index on the Fod24 restaurant database, and this same search technology is exposed to the iPhone app for powerful keyword and parameterised search queries
- True geo-search – the app has a button labelled “Near Me” which actually uses the phone GPS and then does a search for all restaurants within a 3km radius of your current location. You can manipulate the radius used in the search, which opens up really amazing search opportunities such as “show me a map with all the restaurants that serve sushi within 2km of where I am now”
This was a tech-led project, and was a great illustration of what’s possible when you leverage existing data and internal capabilities to create a new window on your content and new ways of interacting.
If you haven’t tried it yet, go to theiTunes App Store and download it, and please rate the app in iTunes once you’ve used it.
Drop a comment here if you have any feedback on the app.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=3e934394-c044-47e1-8626-4e9236e12835)