It’s going to be a hot one, so I got up pretty early.

Went out front just to make sure my lawn wasn’t littered with a free newspaper, then made some coffee and turned on the tube for the first time in almost two weeks. Since my programming guide is pretty much limited to SciFi and Discovery Channel, I was disappointed to find that Comcast has now moved the latter into the premium category - I’m not as happy with them as I thought I was last week now that half the value of my meager $14 price tag has disappeared.

Off to the net, where I found these tidbits:

• Nobody explained Twitter to me, but that may be a non-issue as the service is supposedly getting “Pownced.” Meanwhile, it is now quite easy to get an invite to Pownce as long as you don’t mind coughing up your email address. Now someone please explain Pownce to me?
• People still aren’t watching what they write in their blogs. A Google rep subtlely attacked Michael Moore’s new movie “Sicko”, the blogosphere (and/or someone’s corporate superiors) didn’t like it, and further explanation was required. Meanwhile, a journalist for Business 2.0 took a sneaky shot at Apple’s iPhone with a headline poo-pooing first day sales figures - the resulting comments called out the shoddy reporting and the writer weakly changed the headline.
• It is getting harder to buy a drink without “Big Brother” watching - I’m neither surprised nor will I be surprised when the governments instituting these types of policies find out the procedures create a monster identity theft hole.

No fun. Aw, Sunday is “fight the crowds at Home Depot” day anyway.

Social networking software has been all the rage since Business 2.0 magazine called it the technology of the year, more than a year ago. Since then several service providers have come and gone, and the rest have struggled with the business model. Many have tried subscriptions, ad sales, and miscellaneous charges for “premium” service, only to watch users head for the hills. Now a new idea has come out of one of them, LinkedIn.

In Techdirt:LinkedIn Links To A Business Model, it seems the company has turned to recruiting. In what is described as a Craigslist type listing model, LinkedIn has decided to continue offering some service gratis, while charging for job postings.

CNET News has more on this in LinkedIn to introduce fees | CNET News.com.

You know who should really be doing this….

Why not VA Software?

They run Slashdot, Sourceforge, NewsForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, and several others through their Open Source Technology Group. Yes, they have TechJobs, but they run it through HotJobs. The recruiting model gets little emphasis, but VA’s group of sites likely gets more traffic from qualified technical persons than the rest of the technology related sites combined. Maybe that’s pushing it a little, but at last glance, Sourceforge alone had more than a million registered users.

A million users - writing software for the fun of it! And usually doing a darn good job to boot. Plus, all the folks posting their days away at Slashdot, scraping code snippets from freshmeat, etc. etc., and it seems like a heck of a captive audience to point job postings to.

Anyway, there’s the thought.