Apparently, Ask.com got Merchant Circle to agree to take over the operations of Bloglines. Maybe they will actually invest in it and create a god Google Reader alternative.
Then again, I have no idea how Bloglines fits with what Merchant Circle does now, so we’ll see if this is a good thing for Bloglines users or not.
For that matter, I don’t even know what Merchant Circle does now. 😉
Take a hard look at what leaders are saying about layoffs and what they focus on. Do they seem personally hurt and concerned for the people leaving? Do they have honest and transparent explanations for why they made these decisions? Or do they repeat platitudes about “recession,” costs, and other bits of financial jargon to explain away something so painful to the same people they were calling part of the family a week ago?
Families don’t cut the number of kids when money gets tight. Your workplace is not a family and does not deserve a level of commitment that matches your family or your health. Layoffs are sometimes necessary, but mostly just a nice tool to perk up the value of a company for a specific part of the structure or to make up for mistakes made by the same people making these job cuts.
That’s business. I’ve argued for years that business has a vested interest in employee well-being. Caring about your people is how you get their best. I hope leaders will continue to grow in that regard, but as an individual employee, you need to care about yourself more. If your job isn’t meeting your career needs in terms of money, development, or work-life balance, find a better one. You owe them nothing. They pay you to do a job until they decide not to. You owe them that work.
That is all.
It’s true, having an online presence can be helpful. It can be hurtful too, especially if you don’t think hiring managers might look for you online and make a decision based on what they find. Wouldn’t it be better to present yourself professionally, knowledgeable, and relevant?
I have a random question for the audience today. Do you have a LinkedIn profile? Do you list your blog/podcast/other on-line entity as a position in your profile? Why, or why not? Personally, I do list this blog on my profile, because it’s part of my professional persona. This is the place where I can…
I promised you some more thoughts about using Twitter, so here we go. As you know, I went in doubting it’s usefulness. I still think there’s a whole lot of stuff I don’t care about on there, but in the process of using it, I think I’ve stumbled into some good stuff, mostly in the…
Your government at work. These are the people responsible for protecting all of the personal information that is included with your taxes, and they can’t even find all of their own computers in order to upgrade them, and some of the ones they have found, are still running 12 year old versions of Windows Server….
One of the things I’ve long wondered about bloggers writing about good service from a company is whether they got that service because the company really cares about taking care of it’s customers, or if they got that service because of who they are. A fine example came about last weekend when Louis Gray wrote…
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
See a sample before subscribing here
I have never even heard of Merchant Circle. But hopefully for all the Bloglines users out there, they will do good. I know that I see several people in my analytics who subscribe and read my blog through Bloglines, so there are people out there still using it.