The Library of Congress has 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials, much of it without any metadata (who is in a photo, where it was taken, etc.).  How do you collect all that metadata with a limited government staff and budget?  One way is to have smart people work with an innovative company to form a partnership whereby an active online community can willingly do the hard work for you.  A huge team doing small bits of work can accomplish a lot more than a small team trying to do a seemly endless chore, so they’re starting with 3,000 photos and asking us — the community — to tag them with anything we can contribute.  It’s yet another long tail strategy.  Read about The Commons on Flickr and the Library of Congress (announced today on their blog).

There are countless opportunities for the government to leverage web technologies and communities in ways that will help agencies fulfill their missions and benefit the public in a number of ways.  It’s great to see the Library leading in this area — I hope others follow.

Now that we have all this space, we’re excited to fill it up with smart folks.  We’re hiring passionate people, and I predict you know someone who would be a great fit at Viget.  If you think I’m right, have them visit viget.com and send a resume to jobs.va@viget.com.  If we hire them, I’ll buy you both a beer (or soda, if you prefer).  Some roles we’re looking to fill:

• Office Manager - someone to make our sweet new office hum like a well-oiled machine by doing everything from reception to event planning to supporting little ol’ me in all kinds of work adventures.
• Rails Developers - both senior and less senior.  Come work with our guys who speak at events and conferences and build some seriously great apps.
• Designers - again, both senior and less senior.  Again, we have an awesome team, and we’re looking to make it even more awesome.
• Front-end Developers
• User Experience Designers

We’re actively interviewing for these roles.  If you know anyone who would be a good fit, please send them our way.  We have some very cool work going on and it’s a great time to join us.

Seth, intro’d as “the #1 marketing guru in the United States” (which he politely disputes,) posted this 6 minute video on his blog today.

It’s a quick summary of a lot of the themes he talks about on his blog and in his books including the recent history of marketing — a great way to get to know Seth and how he thinks. Some points:

• Old marketing (i.e., “yelling at people”) doesn’t work on TV, and, contrary to the hopes of marketers when the Internet arrived as a marketing platform 10 years ago, works even less online. Traditional Web advertising fails because ads are too easy to ignore.
• Getting permission to connect with potential customers is the key to successful marketing today and in the future.
• Web 2.0 is a lot about how customers can “market” (positively or negatively) on behalf of companies over the web — most of the results for product searches are for web pages not built by the product company.
• The key here is that the product / service needs to be truly remarkable so that people will be inspired to talk about it.
• Marketing for the next couple years will be all about empowering your biggest fans / customers to talk about your business.
• Web 4.0 will be when “the Net just gets smart” and — with permission — knows what you’re doing at all times and can therefore manage your life better.  His example: your flight is delayed and it not alerts you, but reschedules all of your meetings on your behalf. 
• Social networks grow fast and often die fast because “the party gets so popular that no one wants to go to it anymore.”  The key to success is balancing scarcity such that the right people are in the network, but enough activity so that these “right” people can find each other.
• He notes that blogging — not pounding the networks in Facebook and LinkedIn — is the best way to build credibility and foster this kind of discussion.
• Seth ends with words like “authentic,” “transparency,” and “reputation” — without these, none of this stuff works.