On job hunting and the blogging future in Metro Philadelphia

November 29, 2006

I’ve been qui­et on the blogs late­ly, focus­ing on job search­es rather than rant­i­ng. I thought I’d take a lit­tle time off to talk about my lit­tle cor­ner of the career mar­ket. I’ve been apply­ing for a lot of web design and edit­ing jobs but the most inter­est­ing ones have com­bined these togeth­er in cre­ative ways. My qual­i­fi­ca­tions for these jobs are more the inde­pen­dent sites I’ve put togeth­er — notably Quak​erQuak​er​.org—than my paid work for Friends.

For exam­ple: one inter­est­ing job gets repost­ed every few weeks on Craigslist. It’s geared toward adding next-generation inter­ac­tive con­tent to the web­site of a con­sor­tium of sub­ur­ban news­pa­pers (appli­cants are asked to be “com­fort­able with terms like blog, vlog, CSS, YourHub, MySpace, YouTube…,” etc.). The qual­i­fi­ca­tions and vision are right up my alley but I’m still wait­ing to hear any­thing about the appli­ca­tion I sent by email and snail mail a week ago. Despite this, they’re con­tin­u­ing to post revised descrip­tions to Craigslist. Yes­ter­day’s ver­sion dropped the “con­ver­gence” lin­go and also dropped the pro­ject­ed salary by about ten grand.

About two months ago I actu­al­ly got through to an inter­view for a fab­u­lous job that con­sist­ed of putting togeth­er a blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty site to fea­ture the lesser-known and quirky busi­ness­es of Philadel­phia. I had a great inter­view, thought I had a good chance at the job and then heard noth­ing. Days turned to weeks as my follow-up com­mu­ni­ca­tions went unan­swered. 11/30 Update: a friend just guessed the group I was talk­ing about and emailed that the site did launch, just qui­et­ly. It looks good.

Cor­po­rate blog­ging is said to be the wave of the future and in only a few years polit­i­cal cam­paigns have come to con­sid­er blog­gers as an essen­tial tool in get­ting their mes­sage out. User-generated con­tent has become essen­tial feed­back and pub­lic­i­ty mech­a­nisms. My expe­ri­ence from the Quak­er world is that blog­gers are con­sti­tut­ing a new kind of lead­er­ship, one that’s both more out­go­ing but also thought­ful and vision­ary (I should post about this some­time soon). Blogs encour­age open­ness and trans­paren­cy and will sure­ly affect orga­ni­za­tion­al pol­i­tics more and more in the near future. Smart com­pa­nies and non­prof­its that want to grow in size and influ­ence will have to learn to play well with blogs.

But the future is lit­tle suc­cor to the present. In the Philadel­phia met­ro­pol­i­tan area it seems that the rare employ­er that’s think­ing in these terms have have a lot of back and forths try­ing to work out the job descrip­tion. Well, I only need one enlight­ened employ­er! It’s time now to put the boys to bed, then check the job boards again. Keep us in your prayers.

Quak​erQuak​er​.org, new home to the blog watch

January 3, 2006

I’ve moved the Quak­er Blog Watch mate­r­i­al to a new web­site, Quak​erQuak​er​.org. It’s more-or-less the same mate­r­i­al with more-or-less the same design but the project has become pop­u­lar enough that it seems like a good time to send it off on its own. I hope to find ways of mak­ing it more col­lab­o­ra­tive in the near-future.

You can sub­scribe to the Quak­erQuak­er Watch via Blog­lines or to the dai­ly email by fol­low­ing the links. If you’re already fol­low­ing the Watch in a sub­scrip­tion read­er, you should change the source of the feed to http://​feeds​.quak​erquak​er​.org/​q​u​a​ker if you don’t want to miss out on any future inno­va­tions. If you have the Watch cur­rent­ly list­ed in your blog’s side­bar you won’t have to change anything.

At some point when the dust of the move has set­tled (and I have the new Quak​erfind​er​.org launched as part of my FGC work), I’ll take a moment to wax philo­soph­i­cal about the evo­lu­tion of this project and will toss out a few ideas about where it might go in the future. In the mean­time, let me know if any­thing is bro­ken, con­fused or gram­mat­i­cal­ly mangled.
A kind of ret­ro­spec­tive his­to­ry of the project is avail­able on the “quak­erquak­er thread”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/quakerquaker/ of the Ranter.