How to source X-Men for your technical reqs
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Are you familiar with the X-Men? No, not the superhero mutants of the comics, but rather the XHTML users networking under the radar. What’s that? You never heard of XHTML? Well, here it is in a nutshell…
From the XHTML Friends Network page:
XFNâ„¢ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their tags.
So do you get it? Let’s look at a sample link marked up in XHTML to be sure.
The above link says, “when someone clicks this link, go to the website http://jeff.example.org and fyi… the owner of the website is a friend and someone I have actually met.”
How cool is this? Very cool! Why? Its like Linked In, but under the radar. Imagine searching for software engineers and based on the XHTML in the source code of their website, you can see who their professional colleagues are and go directly to their personal websites. Of course, looking at the source code of every webpage out there is tiresome. Fortunately, I found a searchengine that does the searching for me - RubHub.
Take notice of the search form in the upper right corner. I enter the search terms “software engineer.”
Two results come back! (Okay, so XHTML is still catching on.) Let’s take a closer peek at the second result – Kevin Saffer.
Looks like Kevin Saffer has one site connected to him - “Twocentsworth.com - The homepage and weblog of Aaron M. Jones.” And that Aaron is an acquaintance, someone he has met and is a professional colleague.
Clicking on the search result – “Twocentsworth.com - The homepage and weblog of Aaron M. Jones” brings up 14 more results to explore. Since Aaron is a self-professed “web geek,” quite possibly these 14 links are potential hires. Okay, so should you include sourcing “X-Men” in your search strategy? Ummm… not yet. However, I would keep it on your radar for future use.
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I guess Oracle people don’t have friends? I have an urgent need for Oracle HRMS staff (PM, Technical, Functional) and tried several search variations but couldn’t find anyone other than people into mystic sciences and music.
Oh well, it never hurts to try.