Windows Live Local is now..uh..live and the “Birds Eye” shots really are pretty cool.

Like many AJAX apps, bookmarking and sharing links is too hard, but there is a nice permalink feature that lets you share a whole set of locations and pushpins. See below for an example.

Interesting Windows Local Views

There are those for whom the blog is a subtle statement of career aspirations.

There are those for whom the blog is a thinly veiled attempt to get noticed by innovative recruiters at desirable companies.

And then there’s HireMeGoogle.com. One has to be impressed by the in-your-face directness of a blog whose stated purpose is to get the author hired by Google, and I certainly wish the author every success. The blogosphere has already taken note.

That said, the blog seems more likely to be an amusing curiousity that enjoys its 15 minutes of fame rather than something that Google or any other company would seriously consider. The author says “although writing code isn’t my strongest point, being creative and coming up with new ideas is”, but no actual examples of specific code or creative ideas are on the site– perhaps the most creative idea is that of the site itself. Nicholas Roussos has a post called hire me instead that lays these points out convincingly.

I do believe, however, that blogs used correctly will become an effective way for prospects to be noticed by companies. This requires that blogs be written in a way that truly showcases the skills of the individual, rather than coming off as a simple plea for attention. (In subsequent posts, I’m going to talk about some of the things that I look for in a blog for evaluating prospects.)

Today, the recruiter wanting to use blogs as a sourcing tool is in for a lot of manual labor, but I believe in the future that vertical “people search” services like ZoomInfo will continue to increase in sophistication and usefulness.

There’s is surprisingly little documentation about calling into the JIRA bug tracking system from Ruby using the JIRA Soap interface.

I had to jump through quite a few hoops to make this work. Here’s what I did, to try to spare you the same pain. (There are a few missing details that I’ll reconstruct via more Google searches if anyone is really interested.)

1. I used the wsdl2rb tool to generate a Ruby wrapper interface based on the wsdl file from Ruby. Ruby ships with the soap4r, the soap interface, but it doesn’t actually ship with the batch file wrapper, so I had to download that separately. (URL findable via Google.)

2. There was a bug in soap4r that prevented it from handling the WSDL file correctly, so I had to install a patch to fix that bug.

3. There are few if any examples of using the complex types in the SOAP interface from Ruby. Python seems to automatically convert simple hash tables to structured types, but Ruby’s SOAP interface will give a type error unless you use the appropriate class wrappers. Almost through trial and error, I worked out the following, which does work.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'defaultDriver.rb'

obj = JiraSoapService.new()
token = obj.login("test", "test")

field = RemoteFieldValue.new('summary',
      ['[Updated] Issue updated with Ruby'])

obj.updateIssue token, 'JOB-6562',  [field]

4. Unfortunately, I found Atlassian’s developer forums and documentation a little hard to search and navigate, at least for answering this question. I’m posting it to this blog rather than the forums because I have greater confidence that someone one will be able to find it.

Now that it’s finally working, I’m pretty excited about the ability to script and automate JIRA from external tools.

In many ways, blogs are a far better way for individuals and companies to represent themselves in the talent marketplace than traditional resumes and classifieds. I’ve spoken to many people who credit something they read in a blog for wanting to join a company, or wanting to hire someone.

Recruiters in particular have been innovative and prolific bloggers and blog readers.

In recognition of the importance that blogging plays in recruiting, Jobster is sponsoring the 2005 Recruiting Blog awards. Please vote for your favorites.

The pieces are starting to come together for a web replacement for Excel.

Steve Rubel writes in Micro Persuasion about JotSpot Tracker:

JotSpot just hatched a new service called JotSpot Tracker that puts Excel spreadsheets on the Web for sharing with just a copy and a paste. Combine this baby with JotLive or Writely and not only are you this close from being liberated from Microsoft Office, but you gain very powerful collaboration features as well.

In addition, Confluence 2.0 allows you to paste in Excel tables and edit them using the WYSIWYG editor. Unlike JotSpot Tracker, Confluence does not yet support table sorting, but it’s not hard to imagine them adding these features.

There will be a 5 minute jobbing event being held in Seattle on the Dec 8th. I know people from some of the companies involved and they’re good folks.

The basic concept is: Speed Dating Meets Job Fair. There will be chances to enjoy food, drinks, hanging out, networking, and meeting some local start-up leaders.

You can rsvp & attend if you want, but more importantly, forward this on (using the link below) to anyone who might be interested in attending.

Learn More

When an online casino sends comment or email spam, I delete the message and move on. But when a supposedly reputable corporation posts off-topic comments, it’s worthy of a mention and a slap on the wrist to keep this from getting out of hand.

Recently, a company that offers an “enterprise alternative” for Blackberry notification and synchronization posted an off-topic comment in this blog. It appears a real human being did this, because they got past Spam Assassin. A director of marketing communications from the same company also sent a spam email to my inbox.

Needless to say, I did not appreciate this approach to marketing and on principle am less inclined to do business with companies that abuse blog comments to promote their business.

Jobster Mobile, currently in beta, is the first job search service optimized for mobile devices.

Jobster Mobile allows you to use your cellphone to search for jobs from all over the web based on keyword and location. You can subscribe to alerts for jobs matching your preferences, delivered to your PC or directly to your email-enabled phone. Linked pages from job sites are automatically reformatted to fit your mobile screen.

Simply point your phone at http://labs.jobster.com/mobile.

If you use Berry 411, you can access Jobster Mobile using search keyword “jobs:” (e.g. “jobs: sales”).

If you’re already using Firefox (as about 35% of my users do already), Firefox 1.5 is a compelling upgrade. If you’re still on IE or Safari, 1.5 just might tip you over to the edge in terms of switching. Basic browsing is dramatically faster (especially the back button), and there are host of interesting new features for users and developers.

Two such features are Canvas for scriptable bitmap graphics and SVG, a standards based alternative to Flash for vector graphics and animation.

I’ve put together a directory of links and screenshots for some of the best Firefox 1.5 SVG and Canvas Applications and Demos that show off some of their potential.

Especially worth checking out are foXpose, a tiny 6k extension that provides functionality like Apple’s Expose for tabs, and Canvascape, a first person shooter built entirely in Javascript + Canvas.

Read More

I had the pleasure of speaking last Friday with Mark Fletcher and Robyn Deupree of Bloglines about a variety of topics include mobile blog reading, the Bloglines API, and Berry Bloglines.

I was impressed by interest taken by the Bloglines crew in listening to their users and in staying ahead of the curve on different ways to read blogs. I promised to survey my readers, to help provide feedback on what features are most valuable to mobile blog readers, and to provide input to improving and extending the Bloglines API.

For example, one request is that I’ve heard repeatedly from users is for the ability to keep a message as new even after the other messages in the feed have been marked as read. This is currently not possible via the Bloglines API.

So, mobile blog readers, this is your chance to influence mobile blog reading for the better. Please add comment to this message with your answers in the following areas:

(1) What features would you most like to see added to your mobile blog reader?
(2) How often do you read blogs while mobile?
(3) How important are full articles versus summaries?
(4) How important is offline support for you?
(5) What application(s) do you use to read blogs while mobile?
(6) What device(s) do you use to read blogs while mobile?
(7) Anything else you’d like to share

I’ll collect the results and post a summary.