With the freeze on membership in place right now for the LinkedIn groups, the number of new members has slowed down a lot.

Why the freeze? Will get to that story in a moment… For now, The HRIS World LI stands at 2272 members while The HRIS Career World LI stands at 750.

In May, our Career group developed another hiccup (the last one resulted in any news feeds not arriving for more than 8 months)…

This time, the hiccup is more serious — seems any postings entered directly to the group are being immediately archived while anything arriving electronically (like RSS feeds and feeds from Share buttons) are posting properly.

After discussing this with several other group owners, we discovered we weren’t the only ones affected — and a bit miffed at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s customer support was no support either — the scripted answers we received to our questions only reinforced their terrible history at resolving anything any time soon.

Since no one can really discuss anything, then we choose to freeze memberships altogether in both groups until we could reassess our relationship with LinkedIn.

After a little research, we discovered that many groups that started in LinkedIn had originally started on LI only to leave to establish their own web presence, maintaining LI only to market the group.

Though the reasons were various, the results were the same — they grew rapidly, witnessed an increase in member activities and discussions, and most wondering why they hadn’t done it sooner.

We are assessing the pros can cons and are looking at the logistics of all this, including security for comments and profiles.

Nothing seems like an obstacle though there are several hurdles we have to jump over.

We will be providing an announcement, probably in August or October, as to the who, what, when, where, and how…

But, as the saying goes, the writing is on the wall…

While all this was going on with LinkedIn, our blog activity has skyrocketed! We placed a call for writers a while ago, and the response was unexpected as well as overwhelming.

We have had more than 20 new guest bloggers submit inquiries and/or articles in the month of June.

Many of their articles are excellent and we have been getting lots of comments and activity through twitter about the new articles. We did have to turn down a couple of requests as their material just did not match our audience — but their material was still very good nonetheless.

As a result of the guest blog posts, as well as the GTS Translation Services we use, we have more than doubled the number of unique views – and it keeps growing!

We are now read in approximately 93 countries – actually, we have been visited by more than 93 but we have discounted any visits to our blog that didn’t last more than a couple of minutes.

There are 268 countries in total  – we still have a way to go!

We know most of you have something to share or discuss — that is why we started the LinkedIn groups as well as the blog.

Our guidelines are very friendly and the link to the guidelines can be found at the bottom right of any page on our website.  You can also find them here: bit.ly/GuestPostGuidelines

What topics can you write about?  We are accepting articles on Cloud computing, ERP, HRIS, HR technology, Project Management, Jobs, Job hunting, Recruiting, Career Management and even rambling thoughts that are universal – such as the love for coffee.

You can send your article or questions to webmaster@thehrisworld.com and we’ll get back to you within a couple of business days.

The HRIS World Research Network – this service was initiated with the addition of press releases to our content.  There will be a free service (such as the press releases, with more services to come) as well as paid membership service.  We are still building this, so stay posted through our blog for more announcements.

We are accepting names and email address for the paid services (we never share your email with anyone, it is stored on our servers and no where else) – just send an email to webmaster@thehrisworld.com and we will notify you of the launching of the paid area when it is ready later this year.

Sigma Projeto Brasil – and no, those are not typos.  Just about ready to be initiated, the SPB blog will be focusing on the details, best practices, and methodologies of IT project management for the country of Brazil.  The material will be mostly in English, though some will be in Brazilian Portuguese.  Brazil is now the 6th largest global economy, just recently rivaling the United Kingdom.

As any country going from developing to a developed nation status, Brazil is aware they have a lot to accomplish as well as learn. They are eager to learn, and they learn like they think and drive – fast!  I KNEW there had to be a reason for so many Brazilian winners of the Indy500!

You don’t need to be from Brazil to contribute to this blog — but you do have to know what you are talking about (DOH!).

We will have some postings scheduled but any communications will receive an delayed response.

One of us is getting married and will be on a honeymoon most of the month.

And since he is the backbone to all this work, everyone else is taking a vacation as well.

Why totally unplug for a month?

Well, read one of our articles on this :  The Price We are Paying for NOT Unplugging from Work

And if we are going to talk the talk, then we need to walk the walk…