Broken Promises

• Author: Amitai Givertz
• Posted: May 11, 2007
• Category: That's Life, Blogging
• Tags: No Tags
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Well, it is rather late and I really should be tucking the children into bed and making cocoa for my long-suffering missus. But I have the notion that I can dash off a quick post, by way of an update on my Recruiting.com-in-transition thingie. I did promise I would be home before whatever-o’clock and I still have a minute or two, don’t I?
 
9:48pm: Recruiting.com
 
Parts three, four, five, six, seven and eight and nine and ten of my hypothesis on the future of Recruiting.com will not be published after all. Although it has subsided now, I’m afraid two or three weeks ago when I started the communal histrionics surrounding the outgoing Jason Davis and incoming John Sumser combined with my running out of emotional pocket-change left me uninspired, counting pennies.
 
I will say, having spoken at length to the now-gone and now-here bloggers-laureate I am convinced that my theories about Jason Goldberg’s strategic positioning of Recruiting.com as some kind of money-making proposition to rival David Manaster’s ERE (formerly Electronic Recruiters’ Exchange) may have exaggerated:
 
a) Jason Goldberg’s commercial interest in the so-called “Recruiting Community Portal” and in providing value-added content (read: profitable) to the market;

b) His tolerance for an unwise crowd of yahoos – or a vocal minority depending on the generosity of your point of view — enfranchising one minute and disenfranchised the next; and
 
c) Any interest in making good on his “endowment” to what must seem to him now to be a bunch of ungrateful link-gluttons, myself included.
 
I also think in comparing the two I might have unwittingly understated David Manaster’s ability to quietly get on with his affairs without drawing the ire of a whole genre. Certainly there is more to contrast Jason Goldberg and David Manaster. I wonder how the two men really view each other as movers-and-shakers, authentic and transparent. Much in the same way as a mirror reflects the reverse image to the observer I suspect a close scrutiny in the looking glass would leave David Manaster the only one of the pair able to distinguish the realities of online publishing and community from delusions of grandeur.

So there you have it, broken promise, number one. Or, is it two?

9:54pm: “Emailsification”

There has been some talk about the Recruiting.com community being portable. Hmmm, I don’t get it. What I am getting is so many requests to be someone or others’ friend on Jason Davis’ latest blogescapade — RecruitingBlogs.com — that new invites are getting junked in my mail folder. How ironic. My initial interest in social media came from the idea that email “spamming” and blogging mixed like oil and water, one being the antithesis of the other. Rather like screaming “Roll-up! Roll-up!” at an audience doesn’t quite jive with whispering a confidence to a “friend,” does it?
 
I guess finding a way to mix oil and water would be some kind of alchemy, would it not?

10:03pm: A contemplative moment
 
Oh, I get it! Sweet epiphany! I better start inviting everyone I know – and don’t know of course – to be my friend on RecruitingBlogs.com too. It will be like a boyhood adventure, playing childish games, Chinese Whispers, better still! Yes, I see it now. Reinventing the Recruitosphere, how marvelous! I wonder if Jason Davis will remember our dinner in Grand Central Station when we ourselves whispered in the others’ ear about such things. Who could have known that from a dinner of oysters one could find such pearls!

1:07am: Cold cocoa

I can hear it now, “Amitai, the children expect you to keep your promises and so do I. All this blogging — staying in the office until who-knows-when — is fine and dandy but don’t you think you could have sent us an email at least?

Daggit! I’ll send her flowers instead.