The Jobster team has invested their time in choosing technologies that work well together, and that are well documented and supported. In many cases, these technologies come from open source projects with strong developer communities that we participate in.

For the benefit of other teams facing similar choices, we’ve put together a Tools and Technologies page to document our learnings.

Feedback and questions are welcome, please post your comments to that page.

Just about every blog search engine does a decent job of returning recent posts that contain a particular keyword, sorted by the overall popularity of the blog, freshness, etc.

But what if I want to find a blog most relevant to a particular topic? Every blog search engine does poorly on this task, including the new “blogsearch.google.com”:http://blogsearch.google.com.

Suppose, for instance, that I wanted to find out the best recruiting blogs.

“Technorati’s search results”:http://www.technorati.com/search/recruiting give me fresh postings that happen to mention recruiting, but does nothing to help me find the best blogs about recruiting.

What about Google, the king of relevance? “Google’s results”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=recruiting&btnG=Search+Blogs do in fact include a list of related blogs at the top of the page. It’s the right idea, but their implementation leaves much to be desired. The list is far from complete or authoritative– it has only five blogs of no special relevance.

As I’ve grumbled in the past, the problem is that search engines miss the forest for the trees– they treat a blog as a collection of individual postings rather than as a whole from which a unified theme can be inferred. Fixing this shortcoming is important not only for end user but also advertisers… If you can infer a theme for a blog, you can do a much better job of targeting advertisements that are likely to be of interest to the readers. It’s just too easy to get a false keyword hit on an individual posting and end up with advertisements that detract from the blog content.

No doubt Google intends to improve on the relevance of their related blogs feature over time. I really do think that finding blogs related to a particular topic is a key end user scenario, and that the ability of companies like Technorati to survive depends on beating Google at that game.

We all do what we can to help heal the wounds caused by Katrina, and the long-standing ills that made it so destructive.

Jason Goldberg, Jobster’s CEO, has announced several steps that we’ll be taking. First, “free usage”:http://jobster.blogs.com/blog_dot_jobster_dot_com/2005/09/free_use_of_job.html of the Jobster service by any nonprofit providing relief efforts and any company headquartered in Louisiana or Mississippi. Second, featured placement of relief jobs on our “job search site”:http://www.workzoo.com. Last but not least, we have a “relocation and an account management position”:http://jobster.blogs.com/blog_dot_jobster_dot_com/2005/09/fantastic_katri.html for a sourcing recruiter impacted by the hurricane. The idea is not only to help the recruiter but also the people in that recruiters network. If you know such a person, please help connect us with them.

Help Relocate a Recruiter Affected by Katrina

Inquire for Yourself or Tell a Friend

Click here to learn how

This post is part of a “continuing series”:http://thebogles.com/blog/category/jobster/innovation on growing a culture of innovation.

One of my favorite measures of prospective coworkers– after they’ve passed the minimal bars of fit and experience– is to
hear about hear about a project that they’ve worked on that wasn’t their job. It could be a pet project they’ve done on their own, or an open source project they contribute to, or even a charity they volunteer for.

With surprising frequency, it’s possible to predict they likelihood that they’ll get the job, and the likelihood that they’ll be an innovator, based on the way they describe the project and the things that they did. This accuracy is surprising because more traditional questions often fail to give accurate results in the limited space of an interview. Candidates are often well prepared for standard questions, even probing technical ones, so it’s easy to game the system.

Creating useful technical innovations requires a combination of technical insight and an understanding of customer and business needs– a broader view than is typically required if you’re just doing your job or doing what your told.

A project outside of work forces you take this broader view– you might be one part marketer, one part technical writer, one part tester, program manager and developer– and this broader view develops skills that are invaluable in creating innovation within the workplace.

Outside interests naturally also demonstrate a depth of commitment, passion, and entrepreneurial spirit beyond that required every day in the workplace.

A good side project can be offshoot of work, community of service, or even both. For instance, Mark Swardstrom is doing some great work to help the “Team in Training”:http://www.teamintraining.org/hm_tnt charity recruit volunteers using Jobster. The results of this work benefit not only a worthwhile charity but also Jobster, by adding useful features to the core product such as an events feature Mark added. Before he started at Jobster, Mark worked on a side project called “Poster”:http://www.mobmentality.com/, a simple but powerful website editor. Totally different projects, same underlying drive.

I could tell similar stories about each of the other members of the Jobster team, which is why coming to work each day is such fun.

My top goal at Jobster is to ensure that we have a sustainable culture of innovation that’s relevant to the goals of the business. That another way of saying that Jobster should remain a fun place to work for the sorts of people we need to hire.

Easy to say, hard to do. This post is the first in a “series”:http://thebogles.com/blog/category/jobster/innovation on growing a culture of innovation. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but it’s something I care about a great a deal. Most of all, I’d like to open up a discussion with other people with the same interest and learn for each other.

Reams have been written on the topics of managing innovation and corporate culture. To poke fun at a straw man: some would have you believe that if managers could just come up with the right org chart and mission statement, they could turns the people they have into an innovation machine.

No doubt I’m trivializing a lot of good thinking that has gone on, but I do have a fundamental difference of opinion with the thought that you can “manage� innovation.

Growing a culture of innovation is fundamentally an organic, human process. It’s exhilarating because it requires employees to connect as real people rather than cogs, because it’s about about creativity rather than bureacracy, trust rather than safety, ritual and story telling rather than process and certainty.

The best you can to foster innovation is:

* Hire inherently innovative people.
* Create right relationships of trust and the right communication flows so the innovation is relevant and so that it ships.
* Get the hell out of the way and don’t kill it.

(It also doesn’t hurt to know that you’re in an “innovate or die� business—nothing like the threat of death to help management resist the slide into mediocrity.)

Innovation is hard because it challenges so many of our traditional notions of management. The concept that some people are fundamentally capable of innnovation—and some aren’t—is a radical and perhaps upsetting one. We’d all like to believe that with the right management skills and coaching we could turn lead into gold.
But if only some prospecive employees are innovators, then it becomes critically important to be able to recognize and hire the innovators.

This introduces _Topic 1: It’s hard enough to find people who are merely well qualified, so how do you recognize and attract people with the intangible quality of innovation?_

Once you’ve hired the right people, the challenge is to create room for innovation and to ensure that the innovation sees the light of day in the product. Nothing is more frustrating than to create innovation which never ships, and so many things can block it from happening.

For innovation to become product, it needs to relevant to the business. This means that everyone in the company needs to have a far deeper understanding of the whole business than is traditionally the case. This is partly a function of hiring people who like to have that global understanding, and partly a function of growing a culture that enables employees to obtain that understanding.

_Topic 2: How do you grow a culture that lets innovation become product?_

Shipping innovation requires a high degree of trust and willingness to take risk. Truly innovative work requires a depth of thinking which can be difficult to fully convey to management, and often a degree of risk which makes management uncomfortable. Innovation requires an investment of time and resources—it can’t happen if you don’t schedule for it.

_Topic 3: How do you invest in and reward innovative work?_

Lastly, innovation requires sustained excellence in project management, scheduling, and execution. Teams can’t innovate if they are perpetually on death marches to ship.

_Topic 4: How do you fit innovation into an already chock full schedule?_

Follow up posts on each of these topics will arrive in the following weeks; I’ll also archive the entire collection in a section of the Jobster category page.

Sean Lyndersay has updated the specification for “simple list extensions”:http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/rss/simplefeedextensions and posted a helpful “description and examples”:http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/articles/SimpleListExtensionsExplained.aspx.

The Simple List Extensions (SLX) is a set of extensions designed to do two things:
(1) Make it possible for publishers to declare in their feeds that the feed really represents a “list” (more on that later).
(2) Allow publishers to mark up their lists (and feeds) to note which sub-elements of the item (or entry) represent properties that the user may be interested in sorting or grouping on.

I’ve blogged on Simple List Extensions in the past and think they represent a way to make RSS more effective for things like job feeds.

The major missing ingredient is still a publically available client that implements the specifications. Not even the IE7 or Longhorn betas support it.

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray!

Read about this and similar illusions on the author’s web page.

Following Scott Haug’s lead, I’ve moved from Blogger to Wordpress for publishing this blog, and am quite pleased with the change.

If you read this page, you’ll notice support for categories, including category specific RSS feeds, which should help readers who are interested in some but not all of the topics I just post on. You’ll also notice better search, a new visual design, and improved commenting and trackback facilities. There are a number of features behind the scenes that make my life as a blog author much simpler .

The basic install of Wordpress was extremely simple and really did take less than five minutes. However, it took a while longer to import all of my old blogger posts and comments and ensure that existing inbound links continued to work. For the benefit of other people making the shift, here are some of the things I learned.

Wordpress includes a Blogger import script, but it doesn’t migrate comments. Ed Skelton has updated the import script to migrate comments, but it still doesn’t ensure that permlinks to your site still work.

Fortunately, “Thinkcorps”:http://thinkcorps.com/2005/07/25/wordpress-blogger-import has written an additional patch that preserves permlinks. To save you the hassle of manually making the required edits, I’ve made the modified script available for download at import-blogger.php.txt

Catsutorial has a walkthrough with screenshots of how to apply the patch; you can simply use the download above, renaming it to import-blogger.php.txt.

One other gotcha: the Apache RewriteRules described in the tutorial should be place at the beginning and not the end of the .htaccess file to avoid possible conflicts with the WordPress rewrite rules.

The indeed.com blog has links to
search for hurricane relief work. Great idea, I commend their creative thinking on how to get help to where it’s needed..