Steiner Skipsness, the man who produced the videos, works in search-engine marketing. He says he has nothing to do with job placement or head hunting. He swears his clips are not a YouTube prank. He initially started filming job seekers–without their knowledge–to offer insight into good and bad interview techniques, he said.

If you were interviewing people for a job, what would you do if a young female candidate began openly flirting with you, or if another said the reason he liked his former job was the “lack of responsibility?” How about if one job seeker said she relocated to the area so her husband could pursue a career as a Sasquatch hunter? (See video below).

In the videos, did Skipsness ever stretch the truth?

But Skipsness also acknowledged editing some quotes out of context on at least one of the other interviews. Won’t this send some of the people he covertly videotaped running to their lawyers? Skipsness said he obtained waivers from everybody taped.

The woman in the video who said her husband hunts Bigfoot is named Kelly Lusnia. In a phone interview, Lusnia confirmed her husband moved to Seattle to become a volunteer expedition leader for Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, a group dedicated to studying “the Bigfoot phenomenon.” A BFRO worker also confirmed Lusnia’s husband worked there.

“This is what people want,” said Skipsness, 27. “This is just like Borat,” referring to the fictional character created by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who films unwitting people reacting to his character’s outrageous behavior.

After seeing a YouTube video of people doing these things in job interviews I thought it was a put on. But after making some phone calls to the guy who operates Howtonailaninterview.com, and one of the people interviewed, I learned that I was wrong, or at least partially wrong.

It was only after he saw that some people were capable of bizarre behavior during interviews did he turn the clips into reality TV for the Web.

“How would that be a ‘don’t?’” asked Lusnia, 25, who is now in graduate school. “Everyone I talk to finds my husband’s job interesting.”

“The original idea was to give pure interview advice,” Skipsness said. “We only thought later to add a hook, something funny. We did the flask thing to get the deer-in-the-headlights look from her. But we stopped when she told us about Bigfoot. That was 100 times funnier than what we could have come up with and we stopped.”

Lusnia said that she sensed during the phony job interview that something was amiss. The office was barren and the man who posed as the interviewer poured what she assumed was liquor from a metal flask into his coffee. When I asked Skipsness whether he attempted to spook candidates into doing something funny, he said just that once.

Lusnia said the waiver she signed mentioned nothing about hidden cameras or being part of an Internet dos-and-don’t video. What she was really upset about, however, was that her interview response was under the heading “Don’t mention your spouse’s job.”

At the same time, Microsoft isn’t totally innocent here. DRM was a big part of Microsoft’s pitch for the Windows Media platform, and the company had a whole product team devoted to researching, developing, and updating DRM. Microsoft tried to sell content owners on the idea that Windows Media DRM was much more flexible than its competitors, allowing business scenarios like subscription-based content being transferred to devices (stop paying, the songs stop working on all your devices) and various rental models (like content expiring after a certain time period or number of plays). The laughable part: Microsoft tried to portray these scenarios as offering more consumer choice.

If you’re one of the few who downloaded music from MSN Music, which Microsoft shuttered shortly after launching its
Zune initiative, then you have until Aug. 31 to get that music onto the five devices you’re allowed to put it on. After that date, Microsoft is shuttering the DRM servers used with the service, and any further transfers will render the songs unplayable.

This is the inevitable last step in a transition that began when Microsoft killed its old PlaysForSure initiative. Why keep paying to maintain a service that’s no longer offered, and runs counter to the current strategy? And I believe MSN manager Rob Bennett when he says that Microsoft was compelled to add DRM to songs on MSN Music–that’s what labels demanded from legal download services at that time.

No. DRM is and always has been about about restricting choice. In fact, the whole notion of having “rights” to music you purchase is completely backwards–digital rights management should have been called digital restriction management. So for all of you buying restricted content from iTunes or the Zune Marketplace or anywhere else, let this serve as a warning: the provider or distributor of that content can unilaterally change your “rights” to it at any time. If you’ve invested a lot in DRM-protected music, burn it to audio CDs and then re-rip those CDs into MP3 files. Better yet, buy it in a non-protected format–like vinyl, audio CD, or MP3–in the first place.

“Excellent!” you say, “Now I’ll be able to retrieve an infinite amount of information, like Google.” Maybe. Or maybe our ability to retain and process information will continue to dwindle. Remember books? Those were the things we read before e-mail, Web browsing, and Twitter came on the scene.

Over the weekend, the Asays determined that we’re going to have “reading time” each night for an hour before bed. Everyone (except my 5- and 3-year-old) will read for an hour. My kids were already doing this. The change is for me and for my wife. I need to exercise my brain to think again, and not merely process.

We really don’t want to think like Google. We don’t want to speak like Twitter. We don’t want to converse like e-mail. And yet we increasingly do, as the Internet reshapes the world in its image. Carr writes:

Care to join me? Or is the concern overblown?

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition…The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

It’s not yet on the Web, but
In the the July issue, The Atlantic has an exceptional and provocative article by Nick Carr, asking “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It’s a riff on Carr’s book, The Big Switch (reviewed here), but covers new ground and has me worried. Carr writes:

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”–the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities–we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

Speaking of Twitter, am I the only one who views it as further evidence of a soundbite culture that struggles even to think beyond 140-character blips?

Which is why I’m returning to my books. I read a fair amount–the classics, mostly–but generally only when I’m traveling. As Carr points out, I, too, have difficulty reading when my computer beckons with instant gratification. I read each night to my kids before they go to bed, but Carr’s article has me thinking that I need to return to doing the same.

commentary (Credit:
The Atlantic)

Specifications for the DL582 G2 architecture include AMD Opteron 8200 series dual-core or 8300-series quad-core processors, Nvidia nForce Professional 2200 and 2050 chipsets, and the AMD 8132 chipset. Also: two 100MHz PCI-X slots, four PCI Express x4 slots, three PCI Express x8 slots, and two embedded multifunction gigabit network adapters.

Hewlett-Packard has committed to Advanced Micro Devices’ quad-core Opteron “Barcelona” processors in its Proliant DL585 servers, according to company documents.

HP has also posted a notice on its Web site that states ProLiant Servers Configured with a Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor “require a Service Pack Upgrade for Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP 3 or Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 to Support AMD PowerNow! Feature.”

Top-tier U.S. server vendors are, for the most part, waiting for the B3 stepping of the Barcelona processor, though selected shipments of earlier versions of the Barcelona are going to specialized, high-performance computing (HPC) customers.

The DL585 servers are targeted at the HPTC market in areas including electronic design automation (EDA)/semiconductor, financial applications, petrochemical applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP)/customer relationship management (CRM) applications, large database applications, and video rendering applications, among other uses, according to HP.

Currently, Proliant DL585 G2 servers use dual-core Opteron processors. But HP documentation updated last month makes copious reference to the quad-core Opteron used in HP’s High-Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) DL585 models. For instance, documentation states: “The second generation (G2) HP ProLiant DL585 server offers the performance and efficiency of quad-core AMD Opteron processors, enhanced by improvements to all major subsystems in the server.” This is found in a paper
entitled “HP ProLiant DL585 G2 server technology.”

In this episode, I discuss why it’s imperative that tech companies be more honest and stop playing the PR game, while trying to pull one over on us. Honesty is what will set companies apart from competitors!

Ray Ozzie, who succeeded Gates as Microsoft’s chief software architect, says he would rather “dream” than “think.”

“It gives a guy in SQL (Server) a chance to hear where
Xbox is going,” Ozzie said. “It’s a great mixer.”

“It’s clear he’s gone away and been thinking,” said one person who has been on the receiving end of Ozzie’s lengthy post-”white space” memos.

REDMOND, Wash.–Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was known for his twice-yearly endeavors known as “ThinkWeeks,” intensive retreats where he pored over technical papers written by his employees.

Some 70 such Quests are now in place, within six broad areas, such as the future of information work and the future of the home. Microsoft has added an in-person component to the effort, Ozzie said, with a yearly Quests Summit, in which company leaders meet in different rooms at the same conference center to see what others are up to in their Quests.

Another practice put in place before Gates left was the notion of Quests, which was first reported by CNET News in 2006. Microsoft launched the effort, CEO Steve Ballmer said, as part of a movement to further distribute technical-planning work to more people as Gates prepared to step away from full-time work. Gates officially switched over to part-time work at the end of last month.

Rather than have a ThinkWeek, those who are reading the papers are encouraged to dedicate “ThinkDays” where they reflect and comment on such papers.

While ThinkWeek offered a chance for people throughout the company to lay out ideas that may or may not be within their daily business areas, Quests began as an effort to encourage more systematic visionary planning within business groups. People lay out their most inspired vision for where things could be in, say, 10 years’ time, beyond the typical product release horizon.

That’s not to say ThinkWeek is going away under the Ozzie regime. It just won’t be Ozzie doing all the reading of papers. In the last couple of years, Gates began expanding the effort, enlisting a group of the company’s most senior technical leaders to comment on ideas.

It’s a practice that dates back to Ozzie’s time at Groove Networks and even before that. Inevitably, Ozzie returns to the office with a ton of new ideas, sending a variety of “go do” tasks for his team.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect.

Once or twice a year, Ozzie tries to find time for what he calls “white space.” Rather than be surrounded by the ideas of others, Ozzie prefers to lock himself away with the proverbial blank sheet of paper. His most recent such exercise was during a brief trip to Hawaii in April following a work trip to Asia.

Getting people from across the company to collaborate is key to Ozzie’s work. Much of his vision depends on both business leaders and engineers from throughout Microsoft being able to see beyond the organizational chart, and develop products and services that link together what have traditionally been disparate pursuits.

527 organizations: Financial records dating back to the 2004 election cycle for issue-advocacy groups called 527s, which can raise unlimited funds from individuals, corporations, or unions.

The nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics is making 200 million data records from its archive free for anyone to download for noncommercial purposes on its site OpenSecrets.org.

Personal finances: Reports from 2004 through 2007 detailing the personal assets, liabilities, and transactions of members of Congress and the executive branch. Reports from 2008 will be available to download after they are released to the public in June and the CRP has keyed the reports.

Campaign finance: 195 million records tracking campaign fundraising and spending by candidates for federal office, dating as far back as the 1989-1990 election cycle. The records also include spending from political parties and political action committees.

Lobbying: 3.5 million records from as far back as 1998 on federal lobbyists, their clients, their fees, and the issues they reported working on.

The Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency organization, is underwriting the OpenData initiative with a three-year $1.2 million grant. The data is being made available through a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, which allows users to remix and share the center’s work noncommercially.

While the Obama administration is working on making government data available on sites like Data.gov for citizens to mash up, a government watchdog group is doing the same for campaign financing information.

“Putting our data into more hands will put more eyes on Washington and, we hope, engage more Americans in their government,” CRP Executive Director Sheila Krumholz said in a statement. “We hope that more people counting cash will lead to more people making change.”

If you did, that road down the IT path would likely lead you to clean-tech and Internet-specific businesses, according to results of the 2007 MoneyTree Report released Friday by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

Internet companies, which rely on a business model that’s largely dependent on the Internet, also attracted a substantial slice of venture funding last year, according to the report. This sector attracted $4.6 billion in funding, accounting for a 12 percent increase over the previous year.

Venture capitalists get their investment back through an IPO or sale of their portfolio company. Last year, venture capitalists were able to ride the IPO ride on several notable deals.

“The market was good for IPOs in 2007, but now we’re concerned about the IPO market shutting down,” Deepak said. “Ultimately, the IPO market will come back.”

Clean-technology companies attracted $2.2 billion in investments last year, a 47 percent jump over the prior year. And the number of clean-tech deals rose by 58 percent to 202 venture financings last year, compared with 2006 .

Calling all entrepreneurs: follow the money.

“Software is still the largest segment for funding, even though it is flattening out,” said Deepak Kamra, a venture capitalist with Canaan Partners. “Within software, software as a service and open source are doing well. Open source is a cheaper way for companies to develop applications.”

The software sector, which historically grabs the largest slice of venture funding, had less than spectacular year in 2007. Funding levels for the software sector remained virtually flat, rising to $5.3 billion with 905 deals, compared with $5.1 billion for 920 deals in 2006.

Ah, Russia in springtime. In this latest installment of The Register’s Open Season, we take on the Russian Microsoft mafia (”Get rich by giving me your money”), ask questions of Sun’s open-source strategy, dither in cloud computing, and ponder Hans Reiser’s trial.

Web 2.0 is the same, and VCs would do well to remember that the mainstream majority has a lot more cash than the early adopters. Web 2.0 is just now hitting its stride as it becomes boring and mainstream.

As a case in point, Tim stopped worrying about open source years ago. It’s old news now. But that old news is selling incredibly well into the enterprise. Tim saw it years before anyone else, but those who are building businesses in open source now are reaping the harvest.

So, just as enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 has picked up, the VCs decide to stop funding it. Does this make sense?

Tuesday morning, I came across some news that venture investments into Web 2.0 start-ups have slowed.

It does if we assume that VCs invest in early stage bubbles, not the later-stage mainstream. VCs got into the early stage consumer Web 2.0 party, following early insight from Tim O’Reilly, but seem to be forgetting that the real money will be made in the later-stage, boring enterprise adoption of Web 2.0. Tim O’Reilly watches the “alpha geeks” to see where markets are going long-term; I watch the “alpha consumers” to see where the money is in the short-term.

The other day Forrester Research published the results of a survey that suggested that 63 percent of enterprises feel that Web 2.0 is going to impact their businesses in a big way.