I’m passing this event on from my coworker Kate Leroux, sounds interesting!

Seattle Outsider Artist Project Presents:

WEIRD GENIUS REAL SCIENCE – a Science Fair for the Rest of Us

Friday April 30th - 10PM to 2AM@ The Hall
153 14th Ave (in the Central District near Yesler)
$7, 21+

Come party with actual science in action as strange smart people party with SCIENCE! Real exhibits and projects by PhD’s and dropouts alike! Weird noises, weird lights, weird sights! The world’s Largest Baking Soda Volcano!* Big F@#*ing Operation Game! Vintage educational films! Irresponsible uses of electricity! Booze-dispensing Kill-Bot! And SCIENCE!

Music by:
Compaq Presario
DJ CTRL
Randy Jones
Tawney

Visuals by:
The Rev and Jaime (of NW Film Forum)
Live Organism Microprojections by FreshSquid

Science Projects by:
Ariel Basom, Dr. Mike, Ryan Lull, Rik Garrett, Christopher Bragg, Ffej Mandel, Chad McEvoy, Michael Ricciardi, Honky the Clown, Tatiana Gill, E. Loic Leuschner, Brock Gardener, Tim Sexton, Sno, Jeff Clark, Sean Lamont, and Special Guests!

About us:
The Seattle Outsider Artist Project (SOAP) is a Washington State non-profit for the advancement of marginal art by marginal people, art by non-artists, non-art by artists, and undifferentiated creative proliferation in the community. Please contact us immediately if you feel like you fit into any of these categories. For more info, write to: weirdgenius@inability.org

* Guinness has no current record for the worlds largest Baking Soda Volcano…we asked.

As Jason Goldberg notes, Jobster has acquired WorkZoo. (See also the official press release.)

In the months since Jobster V1 shipped, Jobster has been building networks outward from the recruiters and employees more than 100 leading US companies, such as Nike and Microsoft. These connections provide a trust and knowledge network that allows recruiters to connect with passive, high quality prospects who they wouldn’t discover otherwise.

With the integration of WorkZoo, Jobster will help professionals not only find the right jobs but network their way directly to the hiring team and get noticed. This “outward-in” networking enriches and enlarges the Jobster network, while referrer and prospect ranking maintains the quality of the network. This integration of vertical search and job focused professional networking is unique.

I’ve been tremendously impressed by the passion and talent of the WorkZoo team, as well as the speed at which they work. For example, check out their Integration of job search and Google Maps that they cranked out in record time.

Scott Haug blogs on Sun’s plans to simplify Java and make it accessible to more developers, learning from the successes of open source projects Spring, Hibernate, and Eclipse.

“Simplify” was the word at this year’s JavaOne. Sun announced at the very first general session that they desire to see Java’s population of 4.5 million developers more than double over the next few years. Their strategies in achieving this goal seems are legion, but the overarching theme was very clear: Java should be more accessible for all developers. And they had several fronts in this effort, including revised marketing, streamlined enterprise development, configuration through metadata, and enhanced tool support (there’s likely many more such fronts, but I could only attend so many sessions!).

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This is something I’ve long awaited– a Flickr viewer for Xbox media center, created by Jon Maddox.

Read More and Download

Jobster is delighted to welcome to its board John Connors, former CFO of Microsoft. This week’s business weekup has a good writeup about Jobster and Connors’ active participation in formulating strateging and spreading the word.

“Never heard of startup Jobster? If its latest recruit, former Microsoft CFO John Connors, has his way, you will soon… Connors plans to do more than show up for board meetings at the job-recruitment company. He expects to lend a hand in developing long-term strategy and will hit the road to speak on Jobster’s behalf at industry events. He’s already mining his contact list to give Jobster some sales leads, recently sending out e-mails to CFOs at some of the world’s largest companies, including General Electric (GE ) and Intel (INTC ).

Already, one of his contacts has paid off. Connors, who also sits on the Nike (NKE ) board, sent an e-mail two weeks ago inviting it to try Jobster, which had earlier approached the sneaker titan. Connors’ e-mail helped seal the deal, with Nike signing on as a customer last week…

Part of the appeal of the board position, Connors says, is Jobster’s approach to the recruiting business. Unlike giant job-posting sites, such as Monster.com (MNST ) and HotJobs, Jobster helps recruiters advertise vacancies to a select group of only the most qualified candidates…”

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Location and commute time are often key factors for discerning job seekers. The Glendor Showcase is the first proof of concept integration of job metasearch with Google maps. I say “proof of concept” because the demonstration only covers companies in the Bay Area, only resolves companies to the zip code level rather than street address, and lack important features in other vertical job search engines, like snippets that give you a preview of what the job is about.

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?