Digg Downsizes Team By 10 Percent
The recession's effects have been lessening for several months now, with banks repaying their loans, consumer spending increasing, and the Dow currently around 2,500 points above its 52-week low. Unfortunately, whether due to the recession or for other reasons (note: this occurred before the market started crashing), Digg laid off about ten percent of its employees this morning.
This move comes a month and a day after Kevin Rose replaced Jay Adelson as Digg's CEO, and Rose, to his credit, didn't either leave the news to filter out on its own or try to hide behind a press release.
Instead, on the Digg Blog, he posted an internal email that said, "[W]e strongly believe that it is the right decision for the long-term health of the company. In order to achieve our goals, we are putting more emphasis on the engineering and development efforts. In fact, we are still hiring for these teams as they are critical in getting us to where we need to be for the future, for our impending upcoming redesign and much beyond."
On a more personal note, Rose also stated, "This was an emotional and rough morning for everyone involved. Laying off dedicated and hard working individuals is extremely difficult, but we tried our best to treat everyone with the utmost respect and support. I hope all of you will join me in the effort to assist all of those affected, be it as a reference or a referring source and most importantly, as a friend."
Assuming the cuts were necessary, then - and that's a difficult call to make - it appears Rose is doing a commendable job of reshaping his company. We'll just have to see how people respond to the move as word spreads.
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Fri May 07, 2010 04:25 am
The Impact of Collaboration on Enterprise Business Performance
When you really think about it, collaboration is at the very heart of every business on the planet. It’s very rare that you find someone that is isolated from the rest of the company. Most people are a part of a team that needs to work together to achieve the best possible results; that team is a part of many teams that all need to work together to help grow an enterprise. We collaborate in pretty much everything we do at work, it’s not always efficient and it’s not always effective, but what if it were?
Frost & Sullivan along with Verizon Business and Microsoft conducted research around the impact of collaboration within the enterprise. The results of the study showed that collaboration is a key driver of company performance (study was done in 2006). A global collaboration index model was developed which looked at variable factors that affect collaboration as well as several variables that affect company performance.
A culture openness contributed 36% to collaboration quality whereas the impact of a structure of decentralization or use of collaborative technology in strategy implementation both contributed 16% to collaboration quality. Again the largest factor for collaboration quality had nothing to do with technology but with people and with culture. Strategic planning and collaboration technology for strategic planning (not implementation) both contributed 6% and 5% respectively.
The highlight of the research project was that 36% of a company’s performance was due to its collaboration index. 16% was due to strategic orientation and 7% was due to market and technological turbulence influence. Here is how collaboration affected the various aspects of business performance: [...]
Fri Mar 19, 2010 01:30 am
Google Gives Mobile Users a Link to Popular Images
Google has introduced a new feature for its mobile Image Search offering. The feature is "Popular Images," and lets Android and iPhone users browse popular images (go figure).
The Popular Images feature comes in the form of a link just under the search box on the Google Image Search page. When clicked, it brings up a categorized list of image searches and corresponding images.
"We have organized popular images across a few categories like Movies, Sports, Cars & Bikes, Music, and Cartoons," says Google's Mobile Engineering team in a blog post on the Google Mobile blog. "You can click on individual categories to see related images corresponding to what's popular on Google Image Search."
The queries are categorized automatically with an algorithm, which Google says will continue to improve over time. There is a "Trends" category that shows image queries based on Google Trends.
The feature is only available in the U.S. at this point. There is no word on when this will expand to other countries.
Related Articles:
> Google Puts More Images (And One Big Pic) On Results Pages
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Sat Jan 30, 2010 09:15 am
Glossary: 39 Blogging Terms to Know
Ever hear people throw around terms like RSS or .XML and you wrinkle your forehead in confusion but nod your head because you don't want to admit that you haven't a clue? This blog post will lift some of that mystery by covering the ABCs of blogging's most important terms. 39 Commonly Used Blogging Terms you Must Know!
A
Alternative text/tag or attribute - This has lots of common names and all mean the same thing. This should be used in HTML as the following 
or if using a CMS applied in the field tied to an image for the purpose of describing an image. An alt tag is helpful to both users and search engines should the image not fully render. Alt text is a word of phrase that describes an image on the web.
Anchor text - Used to anchor a URL to some text on a web page. When users view the web page in a browser, they can click the text to activate the link and visit the page whose URL is in the link. Example: This is anchor text
Article - Article and blog "post" are frequently used synonymously.An article is one single post on a blog.
Author - The name associated with the person who wrote a blog post.
Avatar - No, this is not referring to the 2009 James Cameron film. Though not far removed, an avatar is a photo, graphic or image /> [...]
Mon Jun 07, 2010 07:45 am
