Weekly blogosphere update

This week I was struck by a couple of blogging and technology-related posts, so my focus on this week’s blogosphere tour is only partially on the HR/Employment blogosphere.

I’m starting with a couple of posts from the DennisKennedy.com blog Dennis is not an HR/Employment blogger, but a fellow St. Louisan and well-respected law-and-technology expert.

The first post from Dennis describes life as lived by those of us who are up to our eyebrows in information we scan and process via RSS feeds and newsreaders. Dennis refers to “Scoble Country” as a place, but it’s really the life and mind of Robert Scoble, of the blog Scobleizer, one of today’s most prominent bloggers, who is a voracious consumer of (and as this post demonstrates, evangelizer for) all manner of RSS feeds, as well as a prolific blogger.

The DennisKennedy.com post is:“Heart of Blogness: My Journey into Scoble Country”

Dennis describes Scoble as monitoring at least 700 blogs. He says:

I use the word “monitor” for a reason. Like many longtime bloggers, Scoble doesn’t visit each of the blogs he reads. Instead, he subscribes to the “feeds” of these blogs, using a newsreader. It’s the only way you can realistically keep pace with that many blogs.

Dennis says that he considered himself to have entered “Scoble Country, getting a glimpse of what Scoble’s daily life must be like,” when he found himself monitoring “well north of 600 blogs/feeds.”

I can only imagine. My bloglines.com list numbers (only) about 140; yet I struggle mightily to keep up (OK — I fail to keep up).

Read this post. Dennis shares some 25 distinct observations about newsfeeds and the blogging world!

My favorites:

12. Reading Blogs (Not Unlike Reading Newspapers) Places a Premium on Being Able to Read Critically and Assess the Reliability of Information. Being able to read critically and assess what information you can rely upon has become, if it wasn’t already, the most important skill an Internet user can have. . . .In Scoble Country, the sheer number of points of view can help you evaluate information or it can leave you confused. However, relying on one source will only become more problematic.

Yes. Critical thinking. Analysis and synthesis. Learning that both sides of the argument can be (at least partially) right. And, most importantly, negating the nefarious impact of media consolidation on our knowledge of truth.

18. Newsreader Collection Tools Are OK, But What the Heck Do You Do with All That You Collect? . . .The simple fact is that you can easily get overrun by the sheer volume of collected materials. It’s difficult to take action on them. A folder you call “To Blog About” could easily have hundreds or thousands of items in it, which makes it something you can laugh about, but not something that helps you post to your blog. This area is a prime laboratory for personal knowledge management tools.

Yes again. I’m always overrun with what I now call “blawgables.” But now I’m using something called spurl.net to manage my bookmarks and clips.

It’s not all for blogging. After all, I read first and foremost to further my own learning. My memory’s quite inferior to that of a computer. So what I want to do with what I collect — even if I never blog on it — is return to it if the subject comes up and I remember having read something about it.

I can attach key words, excerpts, and even get an automatic cache of the page in case the original vanishes from the Internet. I can create an elaborate hierarchy of categories. And I can run searches within this personal database from any Internet conncection (it’s stored on their server, not mine) to find whatever I need.

20. There Are Some Big Names Who Blog. When I think about it, I move slightly away from the “News that comes to you” approach. I don’t disagree with it, but I change the notion of “news” a bit. I’m now getting the writings of people whose books I’ve read, who’ve influenced my thinking and who are the kinds of people you simply enjoy reading their thoughts and ideas. In many, many fields and areas of interest, you will find significant thought leaders appearing regularly in your newsreader. . . . In narrow areas, you may well find the leading authority in the field showing up in your newsreader. That’s cool.

I don’t have too many of these in my list; but Dennis makes a good point and I may expand my horizons. Of course the fact that Dennis himself, not an employment/HR blogger, is in my reader list illustrates the point.

22. Scoble Country Reminds Me of the Pre-Yahoo World. In the early days of the World Wide Web, before the heyday of search engines, you built your own paths into the web, collecting links to useful sites and resources and trying to find knowledgeable guides. It’s very similar in Scoble Country. Scoble is certainly an excellent guide. I trust his pointers, and those of others I’ve found, far more than any of the search tools.

I hope that in a modest way this Blawg — and its RSS feed — serves such a function for busy people interested in the topics we cover.

23. Amazingly High Quality Information is Readily Available. . . . How about tips on using Microsoft Office from members of the Microsoft Office design team? There are rich resources out there. The more people think that the blog world is the realm of teenage diaries, the more competitive advantage I have and the more cool stuff I can learn that others won’t bother to learn.

No doubt.

“DennisKennedy.Blog Birthday Celebration Week - Bargains for You”

Check it out. Dennis posts links to a couple of RSS feeds that do the bargain shopping for you.

I know many people love to shop and absolutely refuse to buy anything they haven’t been able to touch, try on, etc. in a bricks-and-mortar store. I’m not one of them. The last time I was at a major mall with my wife and teenage daughter, I swore I’d never go again and in the future would buy all my needed clothing via Internet.

Steps in the evolution of Internet sales:

1) Internet stores or Internet sites of bricks and mortar stores open up.

2) Comparison-pricing and auction software and related sites are developed, dramatically bringing consumer markets closer to economic model ideals of perfect information.

3) And now, shopping bots are combined with RSS to bring the bargains to you in your newsreader (dramatically reducing the convenience-cost of getting that information).

Wal-Mart’s going to be around for a while. But in the long haul, with price and convenience as the company’s focus, can it win and keep the business of the Internet generation in the face of an arrangement where one can place a standing order for, say toilet paper, toothpaste, and shampoo, have a bot automatically shop the best price for each from various Internet-only sources that have no retail store overhead whatsoever, with order(s) emailed for your approval and modification, followed by direct-to-the door shipment? (Supplemented by RSS feeds customized to present to you — when you want to see them — deals based on your past purchasing habits.)

The Wal-Marts of the world are either going to be in this business or lose it to someone else.

One last technology story I first picked up through the blogosphere: “Ask Jeeves Acquires Bloglines”

I’ve been using bloglines.com as my newsreader for a while now. This news release shows the growing role of RSS and newsreaders in the Internet information-access business previously dominated by search engines.

Bloglines will continue to operate as an independent brand in the Ask Jeeves portfolio and retain its name and unique URL: www.bloglines.com. . . .

Bloglines indexes more than 280 million live web content elements—news feed and blog articles, images, audio and video . . .

As I get it, Bloglines will use AskJeeves search technology to help users find RSS feeds to subscribe to, and AskJeeves will promote Bloglines to its users. Other synergies are described in the press release.

Now — at last — onward to a few HR/Employment items from the blogosphere.

Workers Comp Insider has this oddball story: “Zookeepers take note: an employment-related practice your supervisors should avoid”

The original article linked is from the San Francisco Chronicle: “Gorilla Foundation rocked by breast display lawsuit; Former employees say they were told to expose chests” by Patricia Yollin

It’s the “rather unusual story of two fired employees, a gorilla, and a million dollar employment lawsuit.” The gorilla is Koko, whose education in sign language was featured in a children’s book my daughter loved when she was in preschool.

Allegedly, the woman who was Koko’s main trainer for decades (since 1972) asked a couple of female employees to show their nipples to Koko, supposedly to satisfy a fetish of sorts Koko developed when her mother was an inadequate breast-feeder and poor Koko had to be a bottle baby. “Patterson communicated . . . that exposing one’s breasts to Koko is a normal component to developing a personal bond with the gorilla.” Supposedly the two women were fired for refusing to comply with this demand.

Is this sex discrimination? What if a male employee’s nipples would have satisfied Koko’s needs, and previsouly male employees had engaged in such conduct? Is a willingness to do this a bona fide occupational qualification (bfoq)? Stay tuned.

Workers Comp insider says:

[I]t’s not a good idea to ask your employees to disrobe in front of the gorillas. . . In fact, unless you can prove that it is an essential function of the job [that's a question here, isn't it?], it’s generally a bad idea to ask your employees to disrobe in front of anyone, beast or otherwise. And another pointer. OSHA takes a dim view of things when you store gorilla urine in the same refrigerator where your employees keep their lunches.

On to the pro-organized-labor Labor Blog, which has this: “Organizing Blind under NLRB Elections”

The post is about an NLRB case in which a union’s election loss was upheld, “despite the fact that 87 of 300 names supplied by the company to the union on the the ‘Excelsior list’” had incorrect addresses.”

This blog complains that “now that employers don’t even have to supply accurate information on what workers will be voting in a union election, unions essentially have to organize blind.”

Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t think the Excelsior requirement’s been abrogated.

Elections lost by unions (and by employers) are frequently challenged, with allegations of unlawful conduct by the winning side flying fast and furious. The NLRB tries to keep its eye on the ball by applying principles designed to separate outcome-determinative violations from those that were not prejudicial to the losing party (just as appeals courts do in ruling on the numerous technical arguments often raised in trial appeals).

Let’s look at the numbers here. The Labor Blog’s cite is to a lengthier, though not more objective, story at American Rights at Work: “Workers Denied Access to Critical Information Before Election; NLRB Further Undermines Integrity of Union Representation Elections”

This article says: “the company’s list had incorrect addresses for 87 employees, and the Teamsters were never able to locate correct addresses for 28 of those employees before election day.” Employees voted 161 to 121 against union representation, with eight additional challenged ballots. Grant the union all eight challenged ballots, and all 28 whose addresses were ultimately lacking, for an additional 36 votes, and the vote is still 161 to 157. Close, but no cigar.

I haven’t read the NLRB decision, but my guess is that this calculation was key, and that the Board was not persuaded that the original lack of accurate information on the other 59 employees prevented the union from having meaningful access to those employees.

The premise that it is so crucial for unions to be able to bug — perhaps harrass — employees by calling or visiting them at home is questionable, in any event.

If there is truly substantial indigenous support for a union organizing drive, the employee-supporters on the inside know full well where to contact the employees they need to persuade.

The Excelsior list is crucial only when the organizing is primarily outsider-driven, as it so often is. Such organizing efforts, of course, are inherently much less likely to succeed, and that is only right.

(Just my management-slanted opinion, which occasionally spews forth in spite of myself.)

Finally, a couple of good quick ones from Jottings By An Employer’s Lawyer:

“All I Wanted Was a Free Magazine,” highlighting the dangers of not reading every word of a union document.

“[A] one page free membership application to the Chicago Painting and Decorating Contractors Association . . . [had this] [j]ust above the signature line:

I have read, understand, and agree to abide by the Constitution and By-Laws of the Chicago Council/PDCA and the Current Labor Management Agreement between Painter’s District Council No. 14 and PDCA (copies available on request).

Hey Bud, that means you agree to abide by the union contract, not just join a professional association and get its magazine.

Luckily, the Seventh Circuit found this ploy “bordered on deception” and did not come close to meeting the standard of “unequivocal intention to be bound by group collective bargaining.” The case is: Trustees of the Chicago Painters and Decorators Pension, Health and Welfare Funds v. LaCosta, Inc. (7th Cir. 2/10/05) [pdf]. But only after a lot of aggravation, lost sleep, and attorneys’ fees, I bet. As Michael says: “Still a costly magazine subscription, that’s for sure.”

Michael also picke up a fascinating case I had also noticed. Fascinating, that is, for those of us who actually sit around and write jury instructions for discrimination cases. Michael’s post is:“Title VII Jury Instructions - 6th Circuit Weighs In On Role of Pretext,” and the case is Williams v. Eau Claire Public Schools (6th Cir. 2/10/05).

In lay terms: ultimately it’s not sufficient for a discrimination plaintiff to prove that the employer’s stated reason for the decision is false; the jury must also conclude — even if from the same evidence — that the true reason (or at least one of the true reasons) was a discriminatory one. And the jury must be so instructed, says the 6th Circuit.

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