Impact of online reputation on job seeking process

Research commissioned by Microsoft in December 2009 found that 79 percent of United States hiring managers and job recruiters surveyed reviewed online information about job applicants.

Most of those surveyed consider what they find online to impact their selection criteria. In fact, 70 percent of United States hiring managers in the study say they have rejected candidates based on what they found.

Review the results of the survey to see how online reputations impact people’s lives. The research comes from interviews with over 1,200 hiring and recruitment managers and 1,200 consumers in the United States, the U.K., Germany and France.

Survey available in English here

Legal aspects of user generated content

Nobody cares !!!! Well, I need to look after legal aspect of user generated content. as publisher we earn our living from the content and intellectual property is one of our assets... I've attend a Juriconnexion.fr event where that kind of topic was addressed and the conclusions of professor Manara from the Edhec Business School can highlight some issues : If your site contain offending content about yourself, you are safe :-) but otherwise you can be responsible to civil law and more... Why ?
The "blogger" or the one that allows user generated content is responsible of the content of his site, the one that provides the content has also his part of responsibility but it's theoretical since you can post anonymous comment/content. Finally, in France, the one that host the site is safe.... That why you'll find a lot of explicit content on their blogging platform ! So, as Publisher, we just need to control that the content is meeting our editorial policy but can we make a commercial product out of it ? Yes if the licence and the Terms and Conditions to post content is explicit. Having said that, who is going to generate content knowing that the site is making money out of it ? Would you ?

BBC about the future of Search

A intersting conference by a project manager at the BBC. The proposed content is increasing day after day, they digitalize more and more archive but the user generated content is also booming via e-mails and mobile phones. The content in their case, is more pictures and short films than text or document but they face similar issues than publishers. They want to make their content available on new delivery channel and therefore need to tag the content (for searching or labelling) independently of the delivery channel. Eg. how to tag the content for search engine and for vodcasting ? Of course, like traditional publisher, the volume of content impact the editorial workload and this process taking ages if they want to make it internally. Therefore they allow user generated tags to reduce the production process. Smart usage of the social web. This could be applicable for legal content but probally on market segement that accepts the community to provide input on their subject.

A side effect of this social tagging, the navigation becomes more and more driven by metadata and less and less by taxonomies managed by an editorial team. Intersting...