Cocktail Napkin to Startup (DIY Part Four)

June 19, 2006

Entrepreneurship Post from the Texas Startup Blog!

Over lunch Brian and I had fleshed out the broad stroaks of the hResume business:

The idea: What if you could create your resume on your own blog or website and allow job sites, potential employers and other interested parties view it as necessary? You could maintain and update your resume in one place. What if the text on the resume was marked up using the hResume Microformat? That would allow machines, not just people, to read the resume. What if you built a plugin for the two most popular blog publishing platforms (WordPress and MovableType) that would create a page on your blog that displayed your resume for people using CSS and for computers using the hResume Microformat? Everyone has a resume and if it was easy they might post it on their site, especially if they could avoid updating it on various sites like LinkedIn and Mosnter. What if their blog publishing platform would notify one or more PING servers whenever they created or edited their resume? What if job listing sites, resume listing sites and employers could gain access to this PING server? They could scrape the hresume data from each resume as quickly as they were notified of a change or creation.

The primers: a) hResume exists (we didn’t need to invent a standard), b) XML-RPC pings are common in the blogging world (most people understand their purpose), c) WordPress and Movable Type are ubiqutious (hundreds of thousands of folks already use the platforms) and d) every recruiter I talked to would be willing to pay a fee to access a site with resume data (not job data) on it.

Key Concepts:

  • hResume Plugin for WordPress and Movable Type
  • hResume XML-RPC Ping Server
  • hResume Driven Resume Listing Site
  • hResume.org to promote use of hResume as a tool for companies like Monster, LinkedIn and Indeed to gather data.

Part One:  Got a great idea?  Join the Napkin Club!
Part Two:  Cocktail Napkin to Startup (DIY Part Two)
Part Three: Cocktail Napkin to Startup (DIY Part Three)
Now it was time to head back to the office. (see below another shot of the napkin)

Comments

No Responses to “Cocktail Napkin to Startup (DIY Part Four)”

  1. Jud on June 19th, 2006 12:40 pm

    Your blogging like crazy Alez, your clogging up my feeds :P!

    Your name as well as hResume came up at BarCampJax 3-4 times! Good luck with hResume, it sounds great.

  2. Alexander Muse on June 19th, 2006 1:02 pm

    Thanks!

  3. Chris Heuer on June 19th, 2006 8:59 pm

    There are some really great opportunities for businesses around microformats. We should talk some more about these…

  4. Tracey on June 20th, 2006 2:24 am

    Great idea Alex, and BTW I enjoy the renewed focus and scope of your blog.

    The implementation that you described reminds me of RETS (Real Estate Transaction Specification).

    Thousands of REALTOR’s use this database API daily to update MLS information all across the country.

    You guys make the web exiting because you are taking great ideas and putting them out in the wild, one every couple of months!

    I wish I could work with you guys. Keep brainstorming and keep implementing!

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