Technology Evangelist. Yes, that’s right, there is a job opening right now for a Technology Evangelist. I will be so disappointed if this doesn’t show up in a song on the next U2 album.

The details: George Mason University’s Center for History & New Media is hiring a Technology Evangelist for their new “open source bibliographic management and note-taking tool” called Zotero – a nifty Firefox plug-in still in private beta. Everything about this job is just so COOL! Can you imagine having that on your business card? Technology Evangelist? And the job really is all about spreading the word – getting people to try out this Zotero, a “scholar’s tool” for grabbing and annotating citations off the web. Heck, I wish I wish I could try it *now*. And here’s the blurb about the Center itself:

“Since 1994, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.”

Ach, I hope there are jobs like this available when I’m done here. Note to self: take more XML classes.

Postscript: I am transfixed by their use of “evangelist” so I looked up the word in the OED.  The first four definitions all have to do with the gospels, the last of which is specifically for “an itinerant preacher having no fixed pastoral charge.”  In 1993, the word took on an additional definition of “a zealous advocate of a cause or promulgator of a doctrine” after being used to describe the relationships of Rousseau to the French Revolution and of John Cleese to shop assistants everywhere. How exiting and scary – that a company somehwere actually wants “zealous” people again.  A new trend or an anomaly? The trouble with zealousness is having that complementary counteracting extreme to deal with, too.