About a year and a half ago I created a MySpace profile and fiddled around with the thing for a while. I was curious about how it worked and wanted to see what it looked like. Unimpressed, I wandered off to do other things.
Recently, I have been interviewing people for a position as a blog, chat and widget technologist at our organization. I've asked the applicants if they have blogs, web sites or MySpace pages I could look at as an example of their work. One of them replied with his MySpace URL.
Memo to job applicants: Never give out your MySpace URL to prospective employers. I spent a half hour sewer diving through the fellow's social network and was appalled. The whole thing is one colossal soft-core porn site. Yes, I know this isn't news to most of you, but I had no idea of the pervasiveness of the problem. I had thought that the complaints were mostly from prudes and killjoys who had found some inappropriate material and had extrapolated from there. I couldn't find anything that wasn't salacious.
I wonder if blog hosts attract certain types of bloggers. If you visit Hugh Hewitt's townhall.com, you will find a bunch of very serious political junkies. I would suggest that Blogger is more mainstream America. MySpace is for swine.
I can assure you that the MySpace fellow will not get the job.
The fact that one replied with his MySpace url only proves that the others are smart enough to steer you away from theirs. It has become common for corporate interviewers to search for a perspective employee's MySpace page to see what kind of person they are. Its surprising how these folks assume what they post on a public site won't be seen by people in authority.
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