Jobs Hunting Through Social Networking Sites?

WASHINGTON (AFP) - – Nearly half of US employers research the online profiles of job candidates on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn, according to a new survey.

Forty-five percent of the employers surveyed for CareerBuilder.com, the largest US online job site, said they use social networking sites to check on job candidates, up from just 22 percent in a survey conducted last year.

Another 11 percent said they plan to start using social networking sites for screening.

"As social networking grows increasingly pervasive, more employers are utilizing these sites to screen potential employees," CareerBuilder said in a statement.

It said job seekers should "be mindful of the information they post online."

CareerBuilder said that of those who conduct online searches as background checks on job candidates, 29 percent use Facebook, 26 percent use LinkedIn and 21 percent use MySpace.

Eleven percent search blogs while seven percent follow candidates on micro-blogging service Twitter.

Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they have found content on a social network that caused them not to hire a candidate, CareerBuilder said.

Examples included "provocative or inappropriate photographs or information" or content about drinking or using drugs.

Other reasons cited were badmouthing a previous employer, co-workers or clients, poor communication skills, making discriminatory comments, lying about qualifications or sharing confidential information from a previous employer.

Information found on social networking profiles was not always a negative factor in finding a job.

Eighteen percent of employers said they have found content on social networking sites that caused them to hire the candidate, CareerBuilder said.

Some profiles "provided a good feel for the candidates personality" or supported their professional qualifications while others demonstrated creativity or solid communication skills.

Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, recommended that candidates "clean up digital dirt" before beginning a job search by removing photos, content and links which could hurt their chances.

The survey of 2,667 hiring managers and human resource professionals was conducted by Harris Interactive between May 22 and June 10. It has a sampling error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points.

Source: Yahoo News!


Continue reading this article...

Feel free to share it!

Free e-books offerings

NEW YORK - James Patterson's latest best seller, "The Angel Experiment," is a little different from his usual hits. The novel isn't new; it came out four years ago. Readers aren't picking it up at bookstores, but mostly on the Kindle site at Amazon.com.

And the price is low even for an old release: $0.00.

"I like the notion of introducing people to one book, while promoting the sales of another," says the prolific and mega-selling author (and co-author) of numerous thrillers." His Kindle download is the first book of Patterson's "Maximum Ride" young adult series.

"We've given away thousands of free e-copies," Patterson said. "`Maximum Ride' is big already and we think it could be a lot bigger. That requires getting people to read it."

Patterson is among the biggest brands added to the growing list of free e-book offerings. Over the past few months, top sellers on the Kindle — with downloads in the tens of thousands, authors and publishers say — have included such public domain titles as "Pride and Prejudice" and "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," and novels by Jennifer Stevenson and Greg Keyes.

In recent days, the top three Kindle sellers have been free books: Patterson's, Joseph Finder's "Paranoia" and Keyes' "The Briar King."

"There's always going to be someone who wants free things. What we're trying to do is link free with paid," Maja Thomas, senior vice president of digital media at Patterson's publisher, the Hachette Book Group, said. "It's like priming the pump."

"What we like to do is make the first book in a series free, usually a series that has multiple books," said Scott Shannon, publisher of the Del Rey/Spectra imprint at Random House, Inc., which published Keyes' fantasy novel.

Shannon said Del Rey has had especially good luck with Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" fantasy series after offering the first book for free. He said sales for the other Temeraire novels increased by more than 1,000 percent. "It's been stunning," he said.

Publishers and authors have been nervous that the standard cost for electronic editions of new releases, just under $10, will take away sales from the more expensive hardcovers and set an unrealistically low price for the future. They are concerned, but open-minded, about free books, which present a chance and a challenge: Readers may buy other books, or, they may simply seek more free titles.

"It's a huge hot-button topic we've been discussing within our division and at the corporate level," Shannon said. "We have had phenomenal success with using free books to get people to buy others by an author. But in the long term, we have to guard the market. We have to make sure people understand that time and energy goes into writing a book."

"Consumers love free — free is a good price. But the opportunity they present to publishers is to experiment, and I stress experiment," Ellie Hirschhorn, Simon & Schuster's chief digital officer, said.

The dominant e-book seller Amazon.com has been aggressive about keeping prices low, and has given free e-books high visibility by including them on the Kindle best-seller list. A leading rival, Sony, does not include free works among its best sellers, although some free books have popular downloads.

"We do withhold them from the best-seller list, so that it's an accurate reflection of what people are actually buying," says Sony eBook store director Chris Smythe.

In an e-mail statement about free ebooks, Amazon.com spokeswoman Cinthia Portugal, said, "We work hard to provide customers with the best value possible and pass savings on to them whenever possible." Portugal added that Amazon includes free books among its top sellers because the list is "based on customer orders — customers are still ordering these books, they just have a price tag of $0.00."

David Bailey, 56, a systems analyst in Tacoma, Wash., is the kind of customer publishers and authors want to get. He has downloaded free texts by Kelly Link, Scott Sigler and others, but has then purchased other books by those authors, sometimes "just to support them."

One of Bailey's free downloads was Finder's "Paranoia," a thriller first published in 2004. Finder, whose "Vanished" comes out Aug. 18, said he initially saw the free offering as a "no lose" deal since "Paranoia" wasn't selling many copies anyway and sales for his other books, including "Power Play" and "Killer Instinct," have gone up. But, noticing all the free best sellers on the Kindle, he wondered if readers will get used to not paying.

"I get a lot of e-mails from people, saying, `I hadn't even heard of you until I read your free book.' So no question, it does bring in free riders," Finder said. "But I'm also increasingly concerned. There are so many free e-books that basically you could stuff your Kindle or Sony Reader with free books and never have to buy anything."


Continue reading this article...

Feel free to share it!

Porn Continues to Plague iPhone Apps Store

Just one week after pulling an X-rated iPhone app offering photos of nude women, Apple has yet again found itself fighting off attempts to upload mobile porn.

An image of a teen girl, purported to be 15 years old who is topless and mostly bottomless appeared in the free app BeautyMeter, which lets users upload photos of themselves that are then rated by others, according to Wired magazine. The app is like an iPhone version of the rating site Hot or Not.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Wired said the app (including the same teen image) was still available in Apple's App store. But on Thursday, it appeared that Apple had removed it.

Funnymals, BeautyMeter's developer, and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment from ABCNews.com.

But in a note dated July 2 on Funnymals' Web site, the developer said that because of " inappropriate content upload we hardened our review process so the release time can be higher since now. As described in our terms and conditions, NO nude content is allowed (bikini content is allowed)."

Another note on the site says, "We don't review each uploaded photo exclusively but from time to time we will clean up."


Last week, after photos of nude women started appearing in the app Hottest Girls, the blogosphere lit up in disbelief.

The application previously displayed photos of women in lingerie and bikinis. But about a week after Apple unveiled a new operating system that includes parental controls that could filter out explicit content, the developers took off what was left of the clothes on the women, and turned up the heat on their product's content.

Read the rest of the story about Apple Porn Apps

Continue reading this article...

Feel free to share it!

Aliens and UFO, are they really existing?

Many of us does not believe on these fictional endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species that is the primary antagonist of the Alien film series. Its existence remains hypothetical, because there is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial life which has been generally accepted by the mainstream scientific community. And yet, need to be proven by bare naked eye.

On the other hand, there's what we called UFO (unidentified flying object). UFO is the popular term for any aerial phenomenon whose cause cannot be easily or immediately determined which is more or like similar to Aliens. Both military and civilian research show that a significant majority of UFO sightings are identified after further investigation, either explicitly or indirectly through the presence of clear and simple explanatory factors, or the Occam's Razor.

The video compilation includes many of NASA UFO encounters/sightings that have been archived by Luna Cognita Productions over the years. All of these examples (with the exception of the second-to-last one) were captured on film by NASA astronauts or Russian Cosmonauts over the past half-century - showing many amazing examples from different eras - Gemini, Apollo, Apollo/Soyuz Test Project, Skylab, STS, the ISS, plus a couple Russian-source additions from their unmanned Zond and Mir Space Station programs as well thrown in to round things out.




Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist specializing in string field theory, and a futurist, will help us to open our minds to our so called, science fictions.



Dr. Kaku appeared in the short documentary Obsessed & Scientific. The film is about the possibility of time travel and the people who dream about it. It has appeared at the Montreal World Film Festival and is in developmental talks about becoming a feature. He also appeared in the ABC documentary "UFOs: Seeing Is Believing," where he suggested that while he believes it is extremely unlikely that extraterrestrials have ever actually visited Earth, we must keep our minds open to the possible existence of civilizations a million years ahead of us in technology, where entirely new avenues of physics open up. He also discussed the future of interstellar exploration and alien life in the Discovery Channel special Alien Planet as one of the multiple speakers who co-hosted the show, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity on The History Channel.


Continue reading this article...

Feel free to share it!

Online Bash Shell For Beginners

If you want to learn Linux bash shell commands in a fun way this is the place for you.

This website provides Unix-like virtual online bash shell command line interface where you can try out bash commands easily online in a web browser without the fear of installing Linux.

Once you gets your hands over bash shell commands you can easily move on to Linux because the knowledge of bash shell commands are essential for operating any Linux distro to its full potential.

Online Bash Shell

Continue reading this article...

Feel free to share it!