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If we were a part of the Netscape crowd, we'd be scared indeed. Not because Microsoft is an evil empire intent on global domination, but because Version 4.0 of the Microsoft browser offers real competitive differentiation. We don't want to spend our lives worrying about "minor" incompatibilities between tools. We want our team clearly focused on doing real work. The current Microsoft product is a powerful step in that direction.

As a company specializing in Internet Research, we've spent literally thousands of hours cleaning up data retrieved from the web. Both Microsoft and Netscape products were guilty of lousy integration with our desktop tools. IE 4.0 solves that question. We want more of the same.

With IE 4.0, our staff moves gracefully between applications using research data to draw conclusions instead of spending hours reformatting.

We think that the Netscape contingent ought to focus its energy competing to provide us the tools we need. Instead, they seem to be hell bent on breaking the ones that work.

It's a pity that the Department of Justice has been coerced into such a shortsighted view. We'd urge our readers to get Office '97 and Internet Explorer. With those tools in place, you'll be making productive use of the web in a relatively short time.

We'll let you know the moment that a competitive product is offered by someone other than Microsoft. We're adults trying to get things done. We hope that the Silicon Valley contingent will begin to focus on our needs. Microsoft certainly has.

Tidbits

Wonder where you can find a huge list of search engines and directories? Go to the Internet Sleuth and look through the thousands of directories and search engines they have categorized to help you get around. You could easily spend the rest of the weekend at the Sleuth doing submissions.

Clickz is a site you should bookmark.

NetMechanic has two services, a link checker and an HTML validator. We haven't tried the HTML validator, but if it is as good as their link checker, we'll probably be impressed. BTW - It's all free.

With their link checker, you can check the links on one page, or on your whole site. The link checker can be run 'while you wait' or you can submit your job and go about your business and pretty soon you'll get an email telling you where to see your results on an HTML page. A nice side note: the link checker handles frames based pages, unlike a lot of the others.

Take a trip over to Gap Mtn Technologies to see a site built around a promotional program instead of around its product.

Newspapers (and a global morsel)

We bring this little tidbit up because we've been reconsidering the role of Newspapers. Yesterday, we gave the online recruiting industry a short swift kick for hanging on to old paradigms. We're sort of obligated to puzzle out the next step.

The question is, "What do newspapers traditionally do and what is their role in our new economy?" It's not so simple. Most folks in the newspaper business are so tuned into what they do that they've forgotten why they do it. We see the newspapers as regional economic engines. By providing a solid home for tombstone advertising and the gray market, newspapers have traditionally been the vehicle of choice in the cash economy.

When you think about recruitment advertising, there's a very large question: "What should a newspaper's role be in regional economic development?" Should newspapers be delivering value to all of their advertising customers as a group?

If you think about the "Netplex", you can imagine that there's a solid base of programming talent. After all, someone had to write all the code for Social Security, fingerprint identification and various Pentagon projects. What's hard to imagine is a deep source of creative talent. One simply doesn't use the words government or bureaucracy and creative in the same sentence. So, if you ran the Washington Post, what would your obligation be?

Well, we think they've made an interesting start at answering the question. It's no accident that "What Color Is Your Parachute?" has its home at thewashingtonpost.com The feature draws surfers from all over to poke around the Post's site. It's our current evidence that some newspapers are taking their regional economic development responsibilities very seriously.

According to a Wired article:

The Post devoted a recent two-part series to the issue, saying companies were starting to revamp plans because they couldn't find enough workers. High-tech job vacancies in northern Virginia alone now number 19,000, according to the Center for Innovative Technology, which forecasts the creation of an additional 112,000 jobs over the next five years.

We wonder if they're tooting their own horn enough. It's a great model but quite difficult to bill. From across the room, we're betting that the Post has chosen a very high road. It looks like they've emphasized responsibility over revenue. It's a move that is likely to have a much higher payback than one that focuses exclusively on the money.

Recruiting overseas? Comprende is a web based service that allows you to create email in English and have it arrive in a language of your choice. Those in the know suggest translating the note back into English before you send it. With that quality check in mind, the service is liable to expand your reach.

Phases

Looking back, the very earliest efforts were simply a way of translating recruitment advertising practices directly to the web. Job listings and databases of job listings are nothing more than primitive reengineering of the staid newspaper approach.

This time last year, Net-Temps launched its pioneering service. Featuring a spider driven resume database, the service broke real ground in innovation. It was the beginning of the second phase. The classified advertising approach begins to fall apart under the pressures of "do-nothing recruiting". Building on the spidered model, this approach harvests your material from your site. Rather than submitting ads to the publisher, the publisher collects them from you.

It's a step forward, but we're still stuck in the early phases of applying the technology.

The transition difficulties are compounded by major demographic changes. For generations to come, there will be more jobs than workers in the American economy. This means that the core readership of classified employment advertising is in a major decline. If you check around, you will hear horror stories about print and electronic advertising that doesn't work in spite of a large investment. That's a symptom of the demographic change.

Last week, Neilsen (the television audience measurement people) released a study that counted 58 Million people online. The next phases of Electronic Recruiting are going to focus on them. The question isn't "how do I get my ads online?" It is "how do I reach the clearly qualified subset of online users who might be candidates for my openings?".

While the third phase of online recruiting will still have an enormous technical bias, it will solidly focus on the second question.