As partial season ticket holders to the Oakland A's, each year my wife and I get a perk which includes passes to the team's annual FanFest, where as a small group, we got to tour the team's clubhouse and enjoy question and answer sessions with some of the team's favorite players. For the second year out of three (See our 2006 report), we got to go, and while weather was expected to be rainy and downright miserable, we were pleasantly surprised to get calm skies.

It's been a long, cold, dark off-season as an A's fan. Since the team missed the playoffs and finished with a losing record, just one game out of last place, we've seen the team's ace pitcher, Dan Haren, dispatched to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the team's best all-around player, Nick Swisher, traded to the Chicago White Sox, and one of the team's veterans, Mark Kotsay sent to the Atlanta Braves. The trades, all done in exchange for young prospects, have had some thinking the team's already given up on 2008. But even if we don't expect Oakland to run away with the division, I believe they'll surprise some people, and today, it was great to enjoy being a baseball fan again.

Arriving at the Coliseum around 11:00 this morning, with my wife and two friends from church, as well as their one-year-old, we made a beeline for the clubhouse tour, seeing the team's locker room and the coaches' offices, lined with memorabilia from yesteryear, seeing magazine covers and bobbleheads galore. Some of the lockers were still adorned with the names of players now elsewhere, as if frozen in time from the end of last season.

Then, the real fun started. We sat in on an 11:45 Q&A session featuring Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers, current A's pitchers Huston Street and Alan Embree, and pitching coach Curt Young. Between the jokes about Alan Embree being old and Street being young, fans got to ask Fingers about pitching in the World Series in 1972 against Johnny Bench and the Cincinnati Reds, and Young about the 1989 World Championship team that featured Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.

At 1:00 p.m. there was another Q&A session, this time with A's hitters Daric Barton, Kurt Suzuki, Jack Cust and Mark Ellis. Of the four, only Ellis was starting with the team at the beginning of 2007. Cust was a journeyman minor leaguer, while Barton and Suzuki were working their way up the food chain to Oakland. This time, rather than sitting idly by, my wife asked Ellis about life away from the family (and his pug) and how he handled that, while I asked Cust how it felt to be in an organization who believed in him and whose fans were supportive of him, compared to others where he always seemed one strikeout away from the minors or one homer away from the majors, but never in a role where he belonged.

Cust seemed extremely pleased with his new surroundings, and while the sports world isn't giving much thought to the A's chances this year, we are excited about thinking about baseball again. We're excited about seeing Barton, Suzuki, Cust, Travis Buck and others for a full year. We're looking forward to spending a lot of time on I-880 going up and back to the A's games starting in April, and catching Spring Training in between. There's just something about baseball that makes the world right, even when not every game goes the right way. The 2007 season ended weakly for the A's last year, and Fanfest reminded us we start 2008 with a brand new schedule and brand new record, that of zero and zero.

The A's have already made full video of each of the Q&A sessions available on their Web site (including my cameo and that of my wife). You can find all that at OaklandAthletics.com. Additional commentary on this year's Fanfest can be found at Athletics Nation. (Fanfest: The Reports, The Gossip, The Aftermath)

I can see how a few overzealous marketeers dreamed up the concept of NotchUp, a new career site for casual job seekers who believe themselves to be so good that prospective employers would bid simply for the right to interview them. The thought... "What if we combine the utility of LinkedIn with viral marketing, using spam and a half-baked pyramid scheme? All we have to do is create a site and force companies to pay for interviews! We'll be rich!"

But the idea is ridiculous. After receiving way too many invites to NotchUp in my e-mail box, primarily from casual business acquaintances who I haven't worked with in years, I thought I'd sign in to see what the noise was about, while also pre-emptively blocking future invites. And what I found was absolutely silly.


Some of the NotchUp e-mail invites I hadn't deleted yet...
NotchUp essentially wants you to recreate your LinkedIn profile, even offering to import your LinkedIn contacts, and then set a price for how much you believe a company should pay for the privilege of meeting with your egotistical self. And, if you act fast, you can spam all of your buddies, thereby gaining 10% of their earnings from interviewing companies as a referral bonus for a full year.

But there are some major glaring holes here.

#1: No company that takes itself seriously will pay for your interview

If a company needs to pay you to interview, they probably aren't one you want to join, and if you're willing to interview for the sole purpose of being paid, with no intention of taking the job, they shouldn't want you.

#2: In order to make any money off the process, you'd have to interview a ton, and never take a job. And all that interviewing might cost you the job you already have.

Notchup encourages you to set a price for interviewing between $75 and $5,000. Assuming you set your price at $250, you would have to conduct 200 separate interviews to rake in a $50k salary. And if you interviewed twice a week at that rate, you would be making $2k a month. But.... you wouldn't ever see that kind of money anyway.

I'm special. Pay me big bucks to chat.

#3: The very best way for people to find new jobs these days is through networking.

LinkedIn is a success because of who you know, not how well you write your resume or how well you interview. LinkedIn shows the quickest route between individuals, and NotchUp doesn't even talk about that. Their entire selling point is about you getting rich, not off working, but pretending to be interested in work.

#4: Friends who spam me shouldn't make a red cent.

You think I'm really going to export my 360+ LinkedIn contacts, invite them all to NotchUp, and then sit back as the profits roll in? Hardly. I don't have stars in my eyes thinking all 360 of my contacts will interview once a month at $200 each, and make me a cool $7,200 a month. If you sent me a spam e-mail asking me to join this quasi-pyramid scheme of a program, I'd have to reconsider whether I'd ever hire you on my team in a future capacity.

#5: The economy isn't so red hot that companies are panicking in need for good employees.

With all the talk about market fluctuations and even a recession, it's not as if companies are dying to meet you. I don't know if they want to meet you for free. The best ones, like Google and Facebook, aren't hurting for talent. They get thousands of resumes a day, most of which won't even get a courtesy callback. Maybe this process would have some chance of success in a go-go time of market inefficiency where job applicants were in control, but not now, and not any time soon.

I'm all for checking out the latest and greatest Web services, but NotchUp is a joke looking for a punch line.

See Also:
Center Networks: There Are Great Ideas, There Are Poor Ideas, Then There's NotchUp
Danny Man: NotchUp? Not so much . . .
eWeek: What if Companies Paid to Interview You?

December 28: Feedburner Milestone Reached: 200 Subscribers... and 4 weeks later... January 25: 400+ RSS Feed Subscribers. From that note, I said, "... it'd be nice to have 500 subscribers or so by this time next year." Sounds like I may have to change that goal to a higher number!

HTML Colors for mosaic from Web Developers Notes | Chicklets from FeedBurner

If there's anything constant about Technorati, it's change. The last few months have been extremely bumpy for the once world-leading blog search and tagging engine, with executive changes, the more than occasional outage, and reduced relevance in the face of Google Blog Search.

But they're not going away any time soon, and tonight, it looks like they've reorganized their front page, to make the site more of a destination, rather than a conduit for you to get to tag data and ego-inflating blog statistics. Of note, Technorati might have gone the opposite direction, moving the most popular sites off the front page altogether, and instead, to Blogger Central.


The new front page highlights posts from my selected "favorites" as it did before, but displays the content in a more text-rich fashion, as if you were reading RSS in a feed reader. The site also brought forward the "My blogs" section, showing current authority level and my number of fans. (Not all that high, mind you)

Also highlighted is the integration of top tags, with a 30-day graph showing the prominence of those tags over time. The rising blog posts and rising news stories, determined by external links and discussion, has been pushed to the bottom, below that of updates from my favorites.

Will this make me visit Technorati.com that much more? Probably not, unless I were to start using the site to more thoroughly walk the blogosphere and tag my favorites. After all, given I have 240+ RSS feeds, and I'm only a fan of a small handful of sites on Technorati, I haven't been keeping up. But at least it shows the company is trying something new in another attempt to make traffic stick.

See Also:
Technorati: Totally Toast In Tracking Real-Time Traction?
Technorati Fights Off Irrelevance With Return of Charts
Technorati Down Again, Google Sure to Benefit