GPS fun on Mobile Phones: April 2005

This is a great little hack. Python running on the Nokia 6630 smartphone determines the current location by querying a portable GPS device over Bluetooth, and then displays a map of that location using Google Maps. Now imagine if you could add overlays that show the current positions of your buddies.

I wonder if it’s possible to do a similar thing using Java and Bluetooth on one of the newer Blackberries?

Barry Hurd writes on job posting spam.

I’ve been seeing a huge spin in resume spam lately that has been multiplied by the fact that most of the major job boards have also gone full bore into “job posting spam”. If you type a fairly specific search term in- there is a likely chance of getting a variety of widely irrelevant job openings ranging from part-time temp work to the all so endearing “make myself rich while working at home” position. If job boards want to remain competitive they need to remain focused on providing quality candidates AND quality job postings.

If you examine many of the current boards- rather than adhere to some basic guidelines you can often find completely irrelevant job posts from various “employers” (I use the term “employer” very hesistantly as some are even selling “opportunities” rather than actually being job posts). Without adhering to some basic criteria and having some audits in place to catch offenders the boards are quickly becoming congested just like the print classifieds.

The online job classifieds marketplace is broken for both job poster and job seekers– spam dominates in both directions. Making job postings free is likely to make the problem worse rather than better– spammers love free distribution mechanisms.

Job metasearch sites, as exemplified by WorkZoo, Indeed, and SimplyHired is not a solution in and of itself. Metasearch users could easily encounter great amounts of job spam, especially if the sites include free classifieds amongst their sources.

The challenge for the job metasearch companies is to do a better job of returning the results that really matter to a particular user.

Job searchers need relevant job results, not more jobs. Without relevance, all metasearch does is increase the amount of spam the user has to wade through to find interesting job listings.

The trick is defining relevance in the context of job search. Job openings are too transient for link-based approaches like Google’s page rank to make any sense. The search keywords alone do not define a meaningful ranking sufficient either. They do not define the user’s true interests well enough to extract a relevance ranking.

What factors makes a job relevant to a particular user, and how can a search engine capture those factors in a personalized ranking?

How can a metasearch engine attract the interest to the most desirable job seekers who don’t want to play the spam game?