Over the years the left and right sides of my brain have been invaded by thinking about the way recruiting online has evolved along a parallel path with other online technologies. In general recruiting as a whole has been a few steps behind other industries in applying various marketing and networking strategies to the online model. As blogging and social interaction software evolves, I foresee a push to establish recruiting campaigns past a product level and further into a public relations level.

In essence, companies are slowly evolving into a reverse ‘candidate reference’ idea. Instead of candidates providing references, the Web 2.0 and blogging culture is providing candidates a method of requesting references from the employer.

As top candidates enter the market, they will spot companies boasting things like “energetic and relaxed work atmosphere” and then they will look for employee references to back it up. Heather Hamilton and several Microsoft employees provide this type of PR related referral for the region’s top software company, but how long will it be before companies realize the benefit of having an employee group that serves as both evangelist and recruiter for the company?

This line of thinking is one of the greatest fears of any corporation’s legal department. Any business attorney cringes at the idea of having 500 company employees with a green light to talk about business and daily life online. Many organizations will attempt to move in a different direction, but with blog groups like Myspace and Livejournal reaching into the tens of millions, it is only time before they realize employees are already talking about the company and they just don’t know it.

Seattle-based Trailfire opened up last week. Trailfire is a combination of a social bookmarking service and a social web page annotation tool. In essence, it allows you to comment and share annotations with both public and personal viewers in your friends groups.

Trailfire is fairly simple to use, download and install the plug-in (Firefox and IE) and it will add a few buttons to your browser window that enable one-click usability. The service allows you to individually mark pages as well as link a series of comments together to for a trail (hence the Trailfire name).

More information about Trailfire is on their About page here.

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Seattle has a variety of major parks including Discovery, Volunteer, Seward, the Washington Park Arboretum, and Gasworks.

The large size of these parks highlights them in the community, but there are also many small parks that feature great places for picnics and scenic views of the area. A number of these parks are named for local figures, giving you an idea that Seattle is a place of interest and intrigue depending on the park.

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Green Lake is surrounded by miles of jogging trails and community visitors can be seen 365 days a year in rain, shine, or snow. The common visitor will often see a variety of kayaking, in-line skating, golfing, wind-surfing, baseball, and general people watching taking place. The east and north sides of the lake have developed small commercial areas providing seasonal services (in-line skate, kayak, and windsurfing rental) and year-round businesses – community shops to little restaurants.