Jeff Barr is an evangelist at Amazon on its Web Services team. He’s getting some funky recruiting email, says that the recruiters don’t have a good database of who has interviewed there before. Doesn’t make one confident that they have their act together when it comes to hiring “Googly” people. Personally I think it’s funny when recruiters don’t use their own search engines and when they put up artificial blocks to try to filter idiots out. Anyone who does an hour’s worth of research with a search engine, like, say, Google’s, knows that Jeff is worth hiring and isn’t worth treating with a bit of the usual filtering bulls##t. Either hire him, or leave him alone. I also wouldn’t let newbie recruiters even get close to anyone who has a blog — I’d make sure that bloggers get handled by a real pro, not the amateur hour kind of hiring folks that are pitching Jeff currently.

Hiring is hard, I know. There are very few people on the street right now. Two entrepreneurs that I met with today asked me if I knew any developers or designers who were looking for jobs. I don’t know anyone who isn’t fully employed right now, so if you want to hire someone you’re going to have to play a pretty good game. Especially if you want someone who has the rolodex that Jeff does.

Whew. Sorry if your comment gets deleted in all of this. Time wasted today alone? About 30 minutes going through more than 2,000 spams that needed to be moderated. Akismet has been so good for so long, hope that Matt and friends are busy working on making it better. I like some of the other suggestions, too (like adding a captcha here, although I personally would hate to see that happen).

I’ve had onstage conversations with Andrew Keen twice in the past week. He’s the author of “Cult of the Amateur,” a polemic about how bad the Internet (and particularly blogs, who he writes are written by “monkeys”) is making nearly everything suck. This is a marketing strategy wrapped in the clothing of a book. Brilliant one too, as I’ve written before.

I hate writing about it cause I’m playing into his publisher’s hands. If I say “don’t buy it, it’s a crappy book” many of you will rush out and buy it just so you can see what I’m talking about. So, I won’t say that. Go and buy it. Make Andrew rich! That way he’ll be a professional author and we can all then write a polemic about that. Heheh.

Anyway, Dan Farber reports on the Sunday debate. So does Scott Roseberg. So does Renee Blodget.

Actually, for being such a polemic, it did engender some interesting conversations at both events.

Well, that’s enough from “your monkey.” 🙂

Oh, wait, it’s time to drive John Welch nuts with my evening’s post of my link blog’s headlines! Heheh. If you don’t want to wade through page after page of full text items on my link blog, just the headlines and links to items are on the Twitter Feed for my Link blog here.

1. Facebook Platform: The Road to IPO?
2. Pandora bringing Internet Radio to Cell Phones
3. Google CEO on Education: Google Search is key
4. VMIX to Power Traditional Media Social Networking Components
5. Follow Up To My Sky Is Falling Post
6. Will DRM-free tunes turbocharge music sales?
7. Interview: Howard Rheingold
8. Interview: David Weinberger
9. Memo to Entrepreneurs: Advertising isn’t a strong business model
10. Rocky
11. Sonos announces new bundle, Pandora integration
12. your library is delicious
13. Netvibes Revisited
14. Pandora Goes Mobile, and Sonos, and More
15. What thoughts should I think?
16. Rootly Relaunces: Design Much Improved
17. Google Calls for Real-Time Spectrum Allocation
18. Seventeen year Cicadas and other stuff
19. Justin.TV Network Launches: More Shows to Come
20. The West Coast Whining Continues … AD NAUSEUM
21. You Have the Choice
22. World of Warcraft Patch 2.1.0 Out Now
23. DigitalKatie — getting her SecondLife
24. No-Frills Videos 101
25. Scoble’s Malaise and Arrington’s Wish for a Downturn usher in a new Silicon Valley Phase
26. Being John Heinricy
27. Maker Faire Video
28. May 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, SIlverlight, WPF, and .NET
29. The Unblogosphere
30. How Microsoft beats Google in ad agency battle
31. 7+7 Reasons Why GOogle Buying FeedBurner is a Match Made in Heaven and Hell
32. Resource hunt heating up
33. Adobe and Microsoft’s Different Approaches to the Development Platform
34. The Future of Ask.com: Search? How About Advertising
35. The Web as Enterprise Productivity Tool
36. Kill the Cash Cow Before Your Competitors Do. Really?
37. Why I Don’t Like Video — My Brain is a Mini-Google, Yours is Too
38. Silicon Valley BUZZ Dilemma
39. GMail Attachments Double to 20MB
40. Roundups: EcoModo – The Best of TreeHugger
41. Every good domain is taken. Here’s why
42. Down and Out on the Internet
43. A community launch: Zooomr Mark III
44. Launch: Zoho Notebook beta launches
45. Maker Faire videos!
46. World Golf Tour launches, worth a round
47. The Sad State of Online Advertising
48. Five principles of blogging
49. Yet more on Panorama
50. Could Ask.com Ever Topple Google? Wait, Let Me Stop Laughing First
51. Authenticity in Social Media
52. Video search company, Blinkx, blows bubble with IPO
53. How to Get Out of Your Funk A-Listers: Stop Thinking About Money
54. Begginer’s Mind for the A List Blogger
55. Live Innovation Journalism Conference Notes: Private equity is biggest threat to journalism in Silicon Valley
56. TweetVolume Shows How Many Times Your Name is On Twitter
57. Apps I’m trying out
58. Second Brain: Organizing Your Information Chaos
59. Tribler Combines YouTube, BitTorrent, and Last.fm
60. CDN Sector Heats up with Level 3 in the Game
61. Keith Thompson: Totally Off the Grid
62. Pandora Still Hates Foreigners, But is Now on Sprint and Sonos
63. Your Invited to a Stanford symposium: How will we pay for the journalism we need?
64. Photojournalism: American Diversity Project
65. Not All Notebooks are Created Equal
66. Message to Michael: Just Say, Well, No.
67. Google Maps Mania links for 2007-05-22
68. Why Microsoft will Never Succeed In Search
69. On2 buys Finnish mobile video company
70. How to Download YouTube videos
71. Sun’s Schwartz Pledges to Use Patents to Protect Red Hat and Ubuntu
72. No more fun in the Valley
73. Another Way to Blog
74. N95 Chronicles: Real Rhapsody (almost) Rocks
75. Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user
76. Dreamliner: Boeing 787LEGO-like Building Begins, Kicks Airbus’ Nuts
77. Watercam: Sanyo Xacti E1, World’s First Waterproof Camcorder
78. Like, Totally WIred
79. Research: Future of Online Advertising
80. Broadband Enterprises’ Digital Upfront
81. Mashup Summit