Rugby Hell
Posted by Seth on October 7th, 2007Rugby Heaven (NZ) appear to have rebranded this morning following the shock defeat of The All Blacks.
All Blacks out of World Cup
Posted by Seth on October 7th, 2007What a horrible weekend for Autralasian Rugby. In a shocking upset, France defeat New Zealand to dump The No. 1 Ranked All Blacks from the World Cup. Thanks to some ill-advised/ill-timed NZ substitutions and to an uncalled French forward pass leading to a try, France were able to get 2 points ahead and hang on under considerable pressure from the NZ attack.
Go Fiji!
UPDATE: Rugby Heaven has coverage here.
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Rock, Paper, Scissors…super-sized
Posted by Seth on October 7th, 2007We’ve all played the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors” at least once in our lives. Its a familiar part of most Western (and much Eastern) culture.
However, did you know there’s actually a World Rock-Paper-Scissors Society? The website even provides hints on strategy and game play, including Official Abridged Rules of Play and “The Great Eight Gambits” for playing “best two of three” games:
- The Avalance (Rock, Rock, Rock). “A subtle yet aggressive gambit”;
- The Bureaucrat (Paper, Paper, Paper). “The deadpan delivery of this gambit is the ultimate in passive-aggressive play”;
- The Crescendo (Paper, Scissors, Rock). “The slow-building nature of this gambit makes it a very elegant opening series”;
- The Denouement (Rock, Scissors, Paper). “This gambit relies on a cooling-down approach to gently destroy your opponent”;
- Fistful O’Dollars (Rock, Paper, Paper). “This gambit is still arguably one of the great surprise offensive moves”;
- Paper Dolls (Paper, Scissors, Scissors). “The complexity of this gambit is belied by its apparent simplicity”;
- Scissor Sandwich (Paper, Scissors, Paper). “An invasive and devious gambit”;
- The Toolbox (Scissors, Scissors, Scissors). “Effective use of this gambit requires steady hands and steely nerves”.
As if this wasn’t enough, have a look at what you can do if you take this…well…just too far:
Don’t try this at home (or work)!
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Wallabies out of the World Cup
Posted by Seth on October 7th, 2007In a scrappy match where England played above their Pool match performances, the English forward pack and the boot of Johnny Wilkinson wins the day and dumps Australia from the World Cup.
UPDATE: Rugby Heaven has coverage here.
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New CareerOne launched
Posted by Seth on October 6th, 2007The new CareerOne site has launched. It looks pretty good. New logo/brand is much cleaner. The site overall is a big improvement, so well done to the C1 team. As usual, Brett is on the case and has his own analysis.
Observations:
- It appears they have dumped the Endeca search engine in favour of the Funnelback search engine. This is an interesting choice.
- Significant portions of the site are still powered by Adicio, including the Job Email, Resume Centre and for some odd reason the Job Details.
- The keyword search is fairly ordinary. A search for chief information officer in Sydney, NSW in the IT & T category returned jobs such as “NSW Police Officer”, “PABX Technician” and “TRAINEE PARAPLANNING ROLE - DEVELOP YOUR EXISITNG SKILLS!”. Seek’s search engine clearly leads in the aspect. However, this may have as much to do with CareerOne’s job content and demographic as the search engine.
- The Salary Survey feature is just links to Hays PDF’s. Nowhere nearly as complete and well-thought out both Seek’s one (why can’t you get to it from their homepage?) and MyCareer’s salary survey section.
- CareerOne’s training feature is just a page of advertising. Obviously, with a major portion of Seek’s business in their Learning division, their training site is much more comprehensive. MyCareer’s training feature is a step in between, being a listing of Open Uni courses.
- The Self employment feature is also just a page of advertising. Again, Seek’s commercial site outstrips this. MyCareer doesn’t even have an offering here.
- The Videos feature looks interesting. The key here will be for them to keep adding content and keep it up-to-date.
- The Career Advice section is actually probably the strongest of the sector. MyCareer’s career advice is also very strong. These should probably be expected given the editorial/newspaper heritage of both sites. Seek’s section is fairly minimal.
Overall? Good result. Great to finally see their new site. Although they’ve hit well short of the promises made to the market and have still got plenty of ground to improve, the new site and brand are good and should provide a good platform to build on.
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New CareerOne site finally launching
Posted by Seth on October 5th, 2007After about a 12 month delay, the new CareerOne website will finally be launched from this weekend. After having nearly sent one Sydney-based web development company crashing in flames (cost of the project blew out well past $1.2mil$5mil apparently), its good to see that News have been able to finally launch the website. Hopefully it lives up to all the hype.
It appears this cutover was better timed to co-incide with a weekend than the previous one several years ago which took the site down in the middle of the week for several days.
The new website comes with a new brand which will be rolling out across News papers over the coming weeks.
UPDATE: Make that over $5mil for build.
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Walled Gardens
Posted by Seth on October 3rd, 2007The Age has a great report today on the crumbling walled garden of online financial content:
Where do these developments leave AFR.com, the subscription-based, online version of The Australian Financial Review?
In serious trouble, I would suggest. Not only is the global trend of paying for online media content working against AFR.com, but it has been plagued by problems with its software, making AFR.com difficult to use, by all accounts.
Michael Gill, chief executive of Fairfax Business Media, a division of Fairfax Media, which owns both AFR.com and The Age, still firmly believes in his subscription-based product.
…
The Australian Financial Review was the first national daily newspaper devoted to finance in Australia and for decades has provided outstanding journalism, making it a must-buy for the business community. But its original competitive advantages are being eroded.
Business information is available free online from myriad sources.
Comprehensive coverage of all industries is also available online in specialist newsletters and journals. Expert commentators are available in various media outlets, print and online.
…
AFR.com has negligible experience in the finance information and analysis business. So it seems odd for an organisation to trade its four decades-plus experience in the finance news business for a bucketful of headaches.
