In the two and half years that I've been sharing "WTF" stories with you, I've never used this space ("the article") to promote myself, the products I've developed, or even my own consulting company. So if you'll indulge me just this once (I promise, I won't make a habit of this), I want to tell you about my latest business venture, HiddenNetwork.com, and ask for your help in making it a success. I strongly believe that it will be something that will greatly benefit us all.

A Bit of History ...
Every now and them, I'd receive an email from a reader who wondered if there was a way that we could all work together to solve The Employment Dilemma. Sometimes it'd be from an employer, frustrated that all of their job applicants have evidently been featured on The Daily WTF already. Other times, it'd be an employee annoyed that his latest gig is nothing but a "Bait & Switch." It took a little while, but a picture of what we could all do finally started to emerge.

As you may have noticed in last month's reader survey, I included a question about jobs and job-seeking. From this I learned two things: first and foremost, seventy-eight percent of you are looking or would consider a new job opportunity. Secondly, I learned that several other publishers and bloggers have started their own mini job boards. I think their moves are a step in the right direction, but I believe that you and I, working together, can help solve the Employment Dilemma even more.

The HiddenNetwork.com Formula
The first part of the formula is blog readers. Have you ever noticed how, out of all the people you work with, the ones who read tech blogs are the strongest employees? It's not that reading blogs inherently makes you smarter, but in order to read tech blogs, you need to deeply care about technology and have a passion to improve yourself and learn more.

The second part of the formula is blog authors. You authors take time away from your busy lives to share your expertise and knowledge with the rest of the world for no reason other than because you enjoy helping and improving the on-line community.

The final part is employers. The good kind of employers. The ones that are just like you and me and simply need to find quality people to fill their quality jobs. The kind of jobs that don't offer The Customer Friendly System or The Tool, but instead provide a good work environment that strong employees can be productive in.

Bringing It All Together
The idea behind HiddenNetwork.com is to bring together employers, bloggers, and readers to share quality job opportunities. We will pay bloggers to run job advertisements that we've personally screened. We offer employers the opportunity to have their job advertisement syndicated through our network of blogs and be displayed to visitors located geographically near the job opportunity.

How You Can Be a Part - Employers
It's simple - just go on over to HiddenNetwork.com and create a job ad. Job listings are free for the duration of the Beta and your ad will be syndicated across our existing network in the next couple of days.

How You Can Be a Part - Bloggers
Head on over to HiddenNetwork.com and see what we have to offer. We pay each time the ad is displayed ($5.00 per thousand impressions) and every time you refer a new employer ($25.00). In other words, if your blog receives 100,000 monthly page views and four employers post a job through your site each week, your monthly blog revenue would be $900.00.

How You Can Be a Part - Readers
Talk with employers you know and encourage them to post a job. The more of you who do that, the more quality job opportunities there will be. Also, write to the authors on your blogroll and encourage them to join. Although the revenue isn't enough to quit one's day job, it offers your authors incentive to continue to write quality material.

Who's Already Signed Up
We have several job listings from various employers that are waiting to be syndicated. We also have several blogs -- including The Daily WTF (surprise, surprise), SqlTeam.com, Mike Gunderloy's Larkware, Phil Haack's you've been HAACKED, and Chris Sell's SellsBrothers blog. Expect to see the network in action over the next few days.

Final Notes
HiddenNetwork.com is officially in Beta. Unlike other company's "beta" periods, we anticipate launching by the end of next week. I've dedicated a lot of my consulting company's resources to ensuring that this product will be a success and look forward working together with you all to make it happen.

Your WTF Article
Don't worry, i'll post it later today. In fact, here's a sneak preview:

A few years ago Phil was working as a developer on wire transfer applications at a large bank. To make sure that nothing technical would prevent the bank from extracting maximum amounts of money from its operations, every part of their system had a redundancy with fast failovers and clustering.  In fact, there was one sever (and a backup of that sever) whose only function was to monitor the other sever and send notifications if anything fell out of the operations norm.

 

Thanks for listening, I'll return with the rest of Phil's story in a few hours ...

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