WorkZoo has a produced a map of job distribution over time in the United States, derived from crawling and indexing both major and minor job boards.

WorkZoo provides metasearch and keyword based feeds of jobs. An interesting side benefit of the necessary crawling is the ability to do trend analysis such as this.

Bus Monster is an inspiring example of web services integration.

Bus Monster begins with Google Maps, overlays bus stops by scraping the King County Metro - Trip Planner, adds real-time estimates of bus arrival times using the REST interface to the UW Intelligent Transit Systems, and adds traffic images using a number of Washington state web sites (to convince you to take the bus!)

The work required to glue together services isn’t always pretty, but the results can be stunning.

There’s a nice little conversation on recruiting going on between Joel Spolsky (of “Joel on software” fame) and Heather and Gretchen, two strategic and blog savvy recruiters at Microsoft.

Gretchen leads with some of the challenges of working with hiring managers who don’t understand the challenges of technical recruiting.

“Hiring Managers (and I’m referring to Microsoft Hiring Managers … but I know this problem exists in other companies) not ‘getting’ the talent landscape. Not only do they not seem to understand that brilliant software engineers don’t grow on trees (you don’t, do you?) … but they can’t seem to get it through their heads that 1) Microsoft isn’t the only place hiring, 2) Working at a big company isn’t everyone’s dream, and 3) Redmond is not the first place people say they want to move when they wake up in the morning.�

Joel replies:

Recruiting has to be done at the Bill and Steve level, not at the Gretchen level… Want to solve Microsoft’s recruiting problem? Open a downtown development center in Pioneer Square and another one South of Market in San Francisco. Then split up the company into lots of small, well-funded startups and give people stock options in their own products, which actually have a fighting chance of growing. Then create some spinoffs with their own personality. Spin off X-Box so it feels more like a cool gaming startup rather than a big corporate “General Motors Trying to Sell Hip Things to an Appealing Demographic.â€? I’m sure there are a million other ideas, but none of the kind of decisions that would make Microsoft an even more attractive workplace are in the hands of the recruiting department or even the hiring managers. No wonder there’s so much frustration.

Years and years and years ago when I started this site I wrote that “a software company has to think of recruiting the right people as its number one problem.�. After five years of running Fog Creek I still think that way, which is why we set up Project Aardvark.

Going after high quality, passive talent is a problems near and dear to Jobster’s heart. I was pleased to see Heather wrote a nice post about her experiences using Jobster to publish jobs to her blog.

An impressive feat of manual special effects:

http://crass.on.ru/flash/pingpong.html

I began my career at Microsoft, and some of the smartest people I know still work there. (Take Sam McKelvie, for instance, of Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, and now MSN search fame…) Microsoft remains a formidable competitor and I wouldn’t count them out of any race, including search.

It looks like the MSN folks are hiring for a number of interesting positions. I spoke with Kevin Kaufmann of MSN Search and they are looking for a strong release program manager; here are Jobster links to additional openings that they have. If you’re someone I know, I can put in a good word for you.

Berry 411 v2.3 has been released for general use. As noted previously, the major new feature is support for user-specified search plugins.

Search plugins allow you to customize and extend the set of searches supported in Berry 411. Examples of currently available plugins include Google news and Seattle traffic conditions. You can author your own plugins to integrate your favorite content with Berry 411 and share them with other Berry 411 users.

Version 2.3. also adds a feature to clear the search history.

Read more about v2.3

To download and install over the air, mail this link to your blackberry:

http://www.thebogles.com/berry411.jad

UPDATE: Please note that version number on the download is incorrectly listed as 2.21, but it is in fact 2.3.

The next version of Berry 411, currently in beta, will support search plugins. Users can add new types of search to the Berry 411 menu by going to “Edit Plugins” and typing the name or URL for the plugin.

Pretty much any mobile friendly web page can be plugged into Berry 411– for example, I’ve created a search plugin called “SeaTraffic”– it displays Seattle freeway travel times based on the Department of Transportation web site.

I’m especially interested in user contributions of new search plugins which I will be adding to a directory.

If you’d like to play with creating search plugins, install the beta version of Berry 411 v2.3 from http://www.thebogles.com/beta/berry411.jad and read the brief guide to search plugins.

You can now play Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall, and other Infocom classics on your Blackberry or other J2ME device.

Troy Davis performed the open source port based on the Zplet Z-code interpreter by Matthew Russoto.

I had nothing to do with the implementation, but I’ve hosted an OTA install of the interpreter for the author, whose ISP isn’t serving up the correct mime types.

The over-the-air install is available by pointing your Blackberry browser at http://www.thebogles.com/z2me/blackberryZ2me.jad. You can download the source code from http://gpf.dcemu.co.uk/blackberryZ2me_src.rar.

TagCloud - Home: “What is TagCloud?
TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.”

TagCloud automatically creates a flickr style tag cloud based on keywords in any sets of feeds you want. I’ve created a tag cloud for Jobster so you can see what we’re talking about. I also made the cloud available in my sidebar by including a snippet of Javascript.

Cloud publishing should really be integrated as a feature into one of the other place where you maintain lists of feeds. (I can see this is a checkbox on my bloglines subscription list, for example.) The hardest part was having to re-enter all of the sites one by one.

Get Turnabout: “Turnabout is a plugin for Internet Explorer that runs user scripts of your choice on any website. User scripts are like plugins for websites. They can enhance your web experience in a lot of ways… Essentially, Turnabout does for IE what Greasemonkey does for Firefox.”

Turnabout is another implementation of the GreaseMonkey concept for IE. Compared with Trixie, it has several advantages. The developer includes source code and permission to modify and distribute the source code and binaries. In addition, the plugin has no external dependencies on .Net or anything else, so the required download size is small.

The downside appears to be that fewer working user scripts are included with the product, but that appears to be primarily a licensing issue that will get worked out over time.

UPDATE: The author of Trixie has decided to throw in the towel in deference to Turnabout. Even if you’re a Firefox fan, as I am, it’s reassuring to know that Greasemonkey innovations have at least the potential of being accessible to anyone regardless of browser choice.