Traditionally, the macro social pattern for online employment has been to go to a site like Monster.com or CareerBuilder and post your resume, some things about yourself, what you’re looking for, etc.

In theory, the idea was that employers were going to work in conjunction with these sites and scour the resumes and miscellaneous info of their registered users increasingly more. In fact, it may even have worked for a time when the dot.com revolution was still en vogue around the turn of the millennium.

In reality, what you are essentially doing now with these sites is throwing a deliberately polished and packaged draft of who you are down the drain.

You waste several of your precious hours (Time=$$$, right?) every day, usually in painstaking obsession, one after another, carving and buffing customized presentations of who you are, complete with resume, cover letter, three references, a portfolio and a rectal exam, to coldly discriminating employers who have to sort through 6,783 different applications for their sole listing: “Corporate chum-scrubber.”

Maybe the dude with the Oxford degree will land an interview.

In reality , the result of the initial online employment prototype has been a systemic, gargantuan glut of information for the employers. In reality, such a basic networking system without giving a human face to all interested parties was permanent Web gridlock waiting to happen. In reality, the paradigm must be changed .

During times of such ineffective online job-searching gridlock, who you know is the only thing that matters. It is here where Bizooki is working to make its mark in easing the career gridlock of the rising generation of young professionals.

Many schools and work places have cordoned off access to sites like Facebook and MySpace because of their serpent-like lure to waste time in which you might otherwise be producing. Producing …for them!

In reality, sometimes your brain just needs a break. Studies show that you should take a five-minute break for every 20 minutes of actual work. How often in the daily grind do you get to take time for yourself and connect with someone or something that doesn’t remind you of your indentured working obligations?

“In my life/why do I give valuable time/to people who don’t care if I live or die?” Morrissey of The Smiths once wrote.

Bizooki aims to be a massive part of that change , a haven for you not only to be able to escape and talk to like-minded young professionals (and even more open-minded older ones) but to give those of you who refuse to be defined as “just another resume” a human face and a network of people who will respect you for who you are.

And hopefully, the more you are allowed to spread your wings for those interested in the tapestry of your total package, the more quickly you will be able to find and make opportunities in which you’ll thrive, personally and financially.

As a self-anointed history buff, I’m always fascinated when I hear labels given to different generations. From ‘The Lost Generation’ of the early decades of the 20th century to ‘Generation X’, the somewhat illusory distinctions separating these groups of human beings, who just happen to be born into different sets of circumstances, baffles me.

Most specifically, I selfishly balk at the exalted status so freely given (and immortalized in Tom Brokaw’s book ) to ‘The Greatest Generation’, the group of Americans who grew up during the Great Depression and completed their coming-of-age during World War II. I asked a fellow history buff, my father, “Why are they so deserving of that title? What did they do that we couldn’t do?”

“Well, it’s just because of the extraordinary circumstances they were put through and overcame.”

It’s not that I feel this generation didn’t earn their meritorious title…but where’s the respect given to those of us not thrust into such infamously soul-hardening situations? How would we have responded?

Our parents, the ‘Baby Boomers’, had their share of excitement, too. From Woodstock to Wall Street, they witnessed several major American socio-political assassinations in the ’60s (including a pair of Kennedy siblings and several of our greatest African-American civil rights leaders ), either fought during or protested against the psyche-destroying madness of Vietnam , and ultimately began raising us during the fiscal boom of Reaganomics.

(more…)

During the second season of the late, great Chappelle’s Show, Dave produced a skit about how creepy and uncomfortable the Internet would be if it were a real place. People were mobbing a “free downloads” music store like it was a Calcutta soccer riot and a glamorous woman he began talking to eventually took off a mask to reveal an annoying spammer.

In the changing climate of modern media, the Internet and different kinds of “conveniences” we consume are becoming not only progressively more personalized and customized to the average user, but the technological convergence in these mediums is already becoming more sophisticated. Like Chappelle’s skit, the Internet is becoming more “real” in that it is making shopping and working increasingly more accessible and convenient; letting us control more with the click of a mouse.

Through Internet programs like Second Life , and Google’s just-launched LIvely, users are able to customize their own virtual lives in a virtual world using “avatars”, or the graphical representation of an Internet user. For the equivalent of roughly 30 (real) dollars per month (although registration on Second Life is free and available to everyone), average people from across the globe are able to escape into this existence and lead a fairly comfortable life, as they use “Linden dollars” (the Paypal-supported equivalent of real dollars on the game; named after creator company Linden Labs ) for transactions in Second Life , expenses that some users say would otherwise be spent on everyday escapes like movies and CDs.

More than just a virtual escape, Second Life , which launched in 2003, serves as much more for its users, from a social experimentation device to a recruiting tool to a cyber-conferencing tool. Media convergence components available in Second Life include visual animation, video, audio/voice and text. Linden Labs has even more recently introduced its own business networking Second Life sub-world, Second Life Grid .

For this market research (”Bizookipedia”), I interviewed several different media-related experts, each uniquely tied to this 3-D virtual world in some way, in order to shed some light on the inner workings and larger impact of this fairly new cultural phenomenon. Additionally, I conducted broad research on some of the existing literature (feature articles, blogs, etc.) for Second Life and spent some time on my own perusing this Internet world. The result is an insightful projection for the future of the Internet and how humans interact. [Bizookipedia begins...]

In our blog posts so far, we have talked a lot about how Bizooki’s goal is to help workers in cubicles around the world, as well as the ones sitting at home waiting for the right call, connect with each other in unique ways; comfortable means of communication which allow our users to facilitate the virtual teams/opportunities they had in mind when they signed up with us in the first place.

But what about the people who do actually "build stuff" for a living: the construction workers and foremen of the world? Actually, Bizooki’s mission is equally geared towards our more blue-collar, down-to-earth work force.

Any ways in which Bizooki can become more of a hard day’s night, replace-the-dude-who-up-and-quit, team-building home and socializing tool for members of our most grassroots professions, the better. As we’ve said before , Bizooki aims to be the virtual team-building and networking (on both local AND global levels) what Facebook has become to social/school networking .

In a continually slumping economy, an increasing number of our young citizens, whether they have a high school (or even college) degree or not, choose to make their livings through landscaping, roofing, gardening, demolition, painting, insulation, installation, plumbing, and other vocational ventures that pocket them money at the end of the day with a renewable base of clientele.

And why not? They’re working for themselves, in part because the economy and job market have let them down. America is full of young men and women starting their own such companies and working with and within their network of friends, downing a few beers and swapping a few jokes after 12+ hour days.

Bizooki, at the end of the day, is a networking site for independent contractors. Of all kinds. If we want to be successful at all, this is our base, and we hope you feel comfortable coming here, constructing and renovating new and existing relationships.

I spent 3 unproductive hours on the phone today with 3+ customer service departments. Interestingly, I needed to connect two separate customer service departments on one large conference call. Try entertaining customer service Agent #1 during a 20 minute hold time with Agent #2! What’s worse is waiting for Agent #2 to call their customer service department (Agent #3) to find an answer for you and Agent #1 who is waiting with you. Welcome to Corporate America.

In the last decade, we have found that the telephone is not an entirely efficient means for handling a chain of communications. For having a conversation they are great. When looking for a long or technical solution, however, we are left with a fairly ancient method for business communications.

So what do we do? We attempt to make communication processes a little easier. We start by launching Bizooki’s Internet-based platform, and the innovation continues from there. Not that we have an overnight solution to customer service processes, but these are the thought processes that drive the forward growth of Bizooki, as a network for virtual team building and virtual team communications.

Email is strange. Enough said. As a stand-alone medium for communication, it simply does not accomplish all the tasks that are needed by a true multi-tasker. Seth Godin pointed out the pain of spam filters that tend to eat away at important messages each day.

When will email become obsolete, or will it? What is the next best communication medium?

He even referenced to inquiries from folks here at Bizooki who experienced issues with spam filters when inquiring about his internship opportunity (it’s filled!). As a side note, we created the official Bizooki lens on Squidoo, a nifty information web site founded by Godin. So nifty, that any profits generated on our Squidoo page are donated to a long list of supported charities.