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Using the web to get jobs bring people to justice

This is a guest post by a good friend of mine, Jason Rothman. For years, he’s been writing about tech, music, and how the web is influenced by both.
Written by Andrew Mager, Inactive

This is a guest post by a good friend of mine, Jason Rothman. For years, he’s been writing about tech, music, and how the web is influenced by both. I hope he wants to be a regular author of The Web Life.

On a completely different note from what I normally write, I would like to point out how the web and social networking is changing how we work together.

The first example happened Monday.

After Digg announced it was laying off 37 percent of its workforce, ex-Digg employees used their superior social networking skills and reached out to the newly laid off via Twitter and Facebook, spreading the word to all their friends and business contacts. Merely hours after the news dropped about the layoffs, people were posting about how they had job openings at companies like Groupon, Styleseat, IGN and even First Round Capital chimed in passing along the word to its entire portfolio of companies.


any Digg engineers looking for a change of scenery? come to Atlanta and work for @CoffeeCup (you’ll love #thaifriday)less than a minute ago via web

Whether all 25 employees will find jobs at other companies is another question, but it is encouraging to see social networking changing how business is done.

Another example of how the web can change opinions: a very disturbing video turned up from outside a Kentucky Senatorial Debate between Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Jack Conway.

Rand Paul supporters tackled MoveOn.org volunteer Lauren Valle, knocked her to the curb, and while two people held her down a man callously stomped on her head and neck. It was all captured on video, uploaded to to YouTube, and now the video is being posted to Facebook pages, Twitter pages, and is being picked up by The Huffington Post, The Daily Kos, Andrew Sullivan, and it made Fox News and MSNBC’s prime time shows Countdown with Keith Olberman and the Rachel Maddow Show.

Warning: this video contains violence:

Both Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Jack Conway issued a statement denouncing the incident, and the Paul campaign fired Profitt and is distancing themselves from him. A spokesman for the Lexington Police Department said on Tuesday afternoon that he being served with a criminal summons ordering him to appear before a Fayette County District Court Judge. Profitt apologized for the incident but says the video makes it look worse that it really was, because you know video often does that.

If it wasn’t for the viral nature of videos and social networking, would this video even have made it to the national airwaves?

Follow Rothman on Twitter.

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