mikescoffield

That's a great article.

Knowledge is power and people/entities in govt are all about the pursuit of power.

This reminds me of an episode of Castle.

Is it easier to increase your rankings by a) building solid quality backlinks to your site or b) building tons of spam links to your competitors' sites?

If the answer is b), which I suspect it might due to reading some comments here citing fiverr examples, then allowing negative SEO is decreasing the quality of search results.

Also, my guess is where the damage is really done is w/ long tail searches. That's when I almost always encounter random, irrelevant, spammy sites - when I search for something very specific in Google.

This seems like an open invite for people to create blatant spam content.

This reminds me of a product features framework I saw once. It mapped features to a 2x2, which categorized features into 4 buckets. The lead bullets were considered "table stakes" (core features that were necessary and everyone had) and silver bullets are probably "fool's gold" (features that are distinctive, but don't necessarily drive adoption).

I use both odesk and elance a lot. I find that the former is better for work that's more commoditized.

E.g.,

For PR work, I'd go to elance. For SEO work, I'd go to odesk.

For a mobile app, I'd go to elance. For wordpress customization, I'd go to odesk.

Her reaction seems a bit too emotional.

I agree w/ what Bloomberg is saying here.

College doesn't make sense for many people/careers. In those cases, whether college is affordable or not is beside the point.

It would be interesting to see someone test this on a public, shared computer.

This reminds me of a comment my former VP made. It was something to the effect of...

Oh, so and so is looking for a new job. I see he's adding recruiter connections on LinkedIn.

This has always interested me. I vaguely recall hearing somewhere that Gmail sells contact info to LinkedIn? Can anyone confirm or invalidate this?

I've had countless cases similar to the Craigslist one that seem uncanny.

That's interesting!

Sadly, it does remind me of how much math/engineering I've forgotten since I graduated.

Are you still a student?

Do you know what the process is for getting those profiles? Does getting profiles also include a way to contact them?

I would prefer a mass method.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Sure. I'm working on a startup that's a marketplace for corporate business documents (e.g. business frameworks, financial models, presentation templates). The marketplace is based on the principle that companies/employees waste a lot of time/effort/$ recreating the same documents and redoing the same analyses.

I'd like to reach out to experienced professionals and offer them the proposition of joining my marketplace as sellers. I would like them to have worked for 5+ yrs, so they have the skills and business insights to build quality, relevant documents. I think my value proposition is more attractive to unemployed folks, since they're in need of money and have time on hand to create documents.

Let me know if you need any more detail.

Here is the site: http://flevy.com

I built a basic pyramid and then tinkered w/ variations from that.

This is pretty cool. I'm playing around w/ different backlink structures. It seems if you link back to a tier 1 link, it will boost your PR. Is this true in practice?

Taking a page from FB's playbook.

I like it! I though it had a simple, smooth, and intuitive interface. I tried my local zip code.

What is your business model?

(Disclaimer: I'm not a developer.)

I still use a resume. In my opinion, if I were hiring a developer, if the person doesn't spend the minimal effort of sending an updated resume, it shows lack of interest on his part. Providing additional links would be a great supplement, but I can't see that as a pure replacement.

Maybe try blog reviews w/ 'exclusive' promos to the blogs' readers.

My thoughts, too.

Plus, it'll be very difficult to get repeat business. I run a couple ecommerce sites and repeat purchases / customer loyalty is a major part of sales. If your products don't have a central theme (i.e. target a focused segment), it is unlikely that a customer who bought random product A would be interested in random product B.

How are you marketing it?