Google is preparing to integrate GoogleBase content (including jobs) into regular Google search results, as reported in Cheesman’s Online Recruitment Blog.

Here’s the email from Google.

Hi there,

We have some great news we’d like to share with you regarding the content you are submitting to Google Base. We are beginning to experiment with showing your attributes and listings in Google.com search results!

In order to make this happen we need your help with a few things. First off, we’d like you to spend some time reviewing your data to ensure you’re providing complete and accurate information about your items.

Next, we want you to start submitting your updates more frequently. For Jobs, Vehicles, and Housing bulk uploads we require that you submit a new file daily. This will help ensure your listings are up to date.

Lastly, we want you to make sure your file includes certain attributes depending on its information type. Please take a look at the table below. Next to each type we’ve included a list of attributes we are requiring be present in your bulk upload.

Information type:
Jobs: job_type, job_function, job_industry, location, education, experience

The decision to show your attributes and listings in Google.comsearch results will be based on the requirements mentioned above as well as our evaluation of the content you submit. If you have any questions, please feel free to reply to this email.

Sincerely,
The Google Team

The requirement to re-upload bulk files to Google every day is a new and interesting one. It makes it harder for smaller organizations to bulk upload their jobs; the assumption seems to be that technology providers will step in to fill the gap. It also greatly increases the flow of incoming data that Google has to handle because it appears every job, vehicles, and house for sale needs to uploaded every day.

Thanks to Mark Swardstrom for finding this one: Webmonkey has published a collection of the Ten Best Flickr Mashups.

I was especially impressed by Retrievr– I sketched a pine tree and got a number of trees in the results list.

There is a fair amount of interest in mobile search but a scarcity of publicly available data on mobile search usage. I have updated the Mobile Zeitgeistpage with statistics for February 2006 based on approximately 150,000 searches.

February 2006

The breakdown by type is pretty consistent compared with November.

Starbucks is a big gainer (up 5) while Walmart is down 4 in yellow page queries.

Rim has entirely dropped off of the top 10 stock quries, while Apple is a big gainer.

Top phones are pretty similar to November, except that the 8700 has entered the list.

Alex Kac, the author of Pocket PC Informant, has created a free Berry 411 client for Pocket PCs called Bogles411. Give it a try if you’ve got a Windows Mobile 5 phone (which I don’t, unfortunately.)

Office Depot has the 512MB Sansa MP3 player (CNETReview) for only $30 after rebate, and the 1GB version for $60.

Considering the low price price, it’s an impressive feature set– 512 MB of memory; USB 2.0; plays MP3, WMA, DRM WMA (Janus), and Audible file formats; backlight LCD display; FM Tuner with autoscan and 20 presets; and a voice recorder. They claim 19 hours of playback on a single AAA battery. It shows up as drive in both Windows and Mac OSX.

I picked one up for the gym and have been quite happy with it so far. It comes with an armband, and while it’s not as sleek as Nano, it’s still plenty small for exercise.

The Janus support lets you take advantage of “all you can eat” subscription services like Napster To Go, which provides unlimited downloads of music to the player for $14.95/month without having to purchase individual tracks.

The Office depot deal ends today, but others have reported similar deals so keep your eye out.

From the Red Herring article:

U.S. venture capital group Ignition Partners said Wednesday it would team up with other China investment specialists to create a new $200-million fund called Qiming aimed at making investments in the Middle Kingdom.

The venture will be based in Shanghai, and will be headed by two key executives from Seattle-based Ignition, including founding partner Rich Tong, and partner John Zagula. They will be joined by Gary Rieschel, founder of Mobius Venture Capital; Duane Kuang, former director of Intel Capital China; and Edward Zhou, who until recently was the senior manager of corporate business development for Cisco Systems.

The company expects investment size to run in the $3 million to $7 million range and will make six to eight investments per year. An announcement of the new company’s first funding effort is expected during the next few months.

Mr. Zagula, who is in the process of learning Mandarin and moving his family to Shanghai, said the investment approach would be a “natural extension of the team’s background” in software, telecommunications, and Internet companies.

It says something that partners at a company like Ignition consider China important enough to not only start a fund there but move to Shanghai and learn Mandarin.

It also says something that the Qiming web site is a blog rather than a traditional corporate web page. I know at Jobster we get at least as much value out of jobster.blogs.com as we do out www.jobster.com/corp at a fraction of the price.

John discusses the new venture and the choice of name:

One thing of note is the name. Those of you who look at this blog, know that we are a bit obsessed with naming. Well, we spent a bunch of time on this. One of the classic branding problems is taking your name into another language. Great bad examples abound, e.g. Microsoft translating as “soft and squishy.” In this case, finding the spirit of a brand and figuring out how to make it logical and relevant to the Chinese market was key. So rather than directly translating “Ignition” into characters that would mean “tiny spark” or “fire starter” we decided to go with Qi Ming which implies enlightenment and inspiration to begin something. Not the same as our name in the U.S. but all the better, this fund is meant to be integrated with us in the U.S. but also it’s own thing for a unique market. Anyway, it was a fun exercise.

Charles Nutter, one of the primary contributors to JRuby, reports promising progress in running Rails in JRuby. This could allow applications that blend J2EE and Rails functionality in interesting ways.

Another approach for deploying Rails in a Java/J2EE container is via the FastCGI interface. This forgoes some of the potential advantages of sharing a VM between Rails and Java, but it’s something you can do already, at least in Resin.

In the Rails discussion list, a user reports performance very close to Lighttpd using the Resin FastCGI servlet.

Unfortunately, the Caucho FastCGI servlet is closed source, and (I believe) Resin specific.

Does anyone have recommendations for an open source FCGI servlet for Tomcat and other servers?

Jobster designer Carol Chapman and her dog Sampson are quoted in this Sunday’s Seattle Time in an article called Pit Bills: Most dangerous of dogs or least understood?.

Sampson is frequent visitor to the offices here and one of the gentlest dogs you’ll ever meet.

Five years ago, Web-site designer Carol Chapman adopted a black-and-tan brindle American pit bull named Sampson through the Pit Bull Project, one of three local rescue organizations that helps place abandoned dogs in homes and improve their public image.

Sampson was among many dogs used as a stud in a home-breeding operation in Bremerton. When his owners were arrested on drug charges, it was a month before animal control learned that 20 pit bulls had been abandoned on the property. By the time officials arrived, 10 dogs were dead and five were so sick they had to be euthanized. Sampson was among the five who survived on trash in the house.

The experience did not ruin Sampson. “He’s really mild-mannered and kind of a coward,” says Chapman. “He breaks up cat fights. He’s kind of like a peacekeeper.”

Yahoo has open sourced a set of web UI widgets (e.g. a calendar control, tree view, drag and drop modules) (under a BSD license) and UI design patterns. They look to be polished and well documented; it’s great a see a big company contributing to the common good.

Jobster has just been rated the 4th best site for active jobseekers in the Job Search Engine Guide

Only one site will emerge from this comparison as the best for active job search; yet all four at the top are winners in my book.

For our hypothetical jobseeker, searching for the site with the highest job market coverage (see the initial post for detail), Jobster delivers a score of 72% for 4th place.

Rank shouldn’t be confused with utility however – at 72% coverage, Jobster is in a higher class than the 5th place (52%) and 6th place (28%) finishers.

And of the top four finishers, only Jobster focuses more on helping jobseekers get noticed by employers, than on presenting the most job ads. This is critical since finding the right job is only the first step in the hiring process. Just as important for the jobseeker is avoiding the infamous resume black hole – the place where unescorted resumes go to die.

In the coming weeks, Jobster plans to broaden their coverage of the job market. Even so, Jobster is a top-tier site delivering 72% coverage – good for a strong 4th place for active job search.

Getting to this broad level of online job coverage has been an interesting engineering challenge, requiring us to build both technology and processes that scale to large numbers of job sources. We’ve created a specialized mini-language for extracting structured data from online job sources and an engineering process that includes both local and outsourced talent for developing and testing the code.