Jobster Trends is a new feature that gives you a look at the who, where, and what of job search. It includes the most popular searches, biggest gainers and losers, as well as the most popular job search locations.

Combine this data with information about what jobs are being posted where, as Jobster obtains by crawling the web, and you start to have a pretty interesting map of supply vs. demand across the country for different types of positions.

We look forward to presenting more of this data over time; it’s a pretty fascinating topic. Eventually, I can imagine economists using search data as one of the things they factor into their forecast.

Walt Mossberg delivers a rave review of the new Ask.com search site, as noted by John Battelle.

I’ve been testing the new Ask.com against the search champ, Google. I’ve found that in terms of relevant results and ease of use, Ask holds its own with Google, and even beats the champ on some searches. It has some very nice features Google lacks, including previews of the sites it finds, an easy way to narrow or broaden your search results, and frequent top-of-the-screen answers that lead you directly to core information.

When I tried searching for Sri Lanka, Ask displayed relevant content from the CIA World Factbook (the flag, population, etc) at the top of the page, related news, and links for narrowing and expanding my search (Maldives, Pakistan, Bangledesh, etc.)

Good to keep the search race competitive and not let Google win by default.

Jobster and Six Apart are pleased to announce the new Jobster widgets for Typepad blog authors, which make it easy for any blog author to provide relevant jobs to their readers.  To promote the new widgets, we are including 400 chances to win free Typepad service. These widgets reflect Jobster’s philosophy of enabling a more distributed, social approach to finding and advertising jobs.

(If you’re a Typepad user, you should also check out some of the other new widgets in the Typepad Widget Gallery)

sample job feed widget

Below are the full details from Jason’s post on the Jobster Blog.

hundreds of thousands of individuals — like myself — who can’t write a single line of computer code to save their life, rely on typepad to power their blogs.  typepad has made it so easy that anyone can do it.

today, jobster and typepad are teaming up to enable typepad bloggers to easily add a sidebar with relevant jobs and/or a jobster search box to their blogs.  (read more about this exciting news) 

think of it as an important first step in “distributed job search.”  we take the most contextually relevant job listings where the readers are vs. expecting them to go to a job board.  as i like to say, in this day and age, that great web services developer (for instance) is more likely to be reading a blog on a topic like “ruby on rails” than they are to be searching on a job board on a given day, so we need to get our jobs where they are.

Blogging about recruiting?  add a jobster feed of recruiting jobs to provide useful content to your readership, kinda like jason davis does at recruiting.com (see right column sidebar).

Blogging about marketing?  add a jobster feed of marketing jobs to provide useful content to your readership, kinda like  harry joiner, the marketing headhunter is doing.

but wait, there’s more.

FREE TYPEPAD FOR A YEAR!  As part of this launch, Jobster is offering 400 individuals free typepad service for a year.  If you are already a typepad user, all you need to do is install a jobster widget on your typepad blog before may 25th, check a box, and you can win free typead blogging for a year.  that’s right, jobster will pay for your typepad subscription for a year. 

what, you don’t have a typepad blog yet?  click here to get a typepad account and then add the jobster widget to your blog , enter then enter our “free blogging” promotion, so we can start paying your blogging fees for you.

it’s easy!

pretty cool, huh?

If you’re an experienced product manager in the mobile space, the following position might be of interest to you. T-Mobile is hiring an experienced Product Manager in Bellevue.

(Disclosure: T-Mobile is a Jobster customer and I’d like to help connect them with someone good.)

This product leader is responsible for driving the product strategy in conjunction with the Product Development group for Broadband business.

What does that mean to you?

It means you’ll work with Sales and Product Development groups on rigorous analysis of customer needs, definition, and evangelism of customer/partner/market requirements with a focus on business. You’ll develop detailed MRD and PRD documents with defined screen navigation. And, you will provide analysis, identification and strategy regarding new product and service integration in close coordination with Product Development group.

If that’s not enough to keep you challenged, you can drive the development and management of business cases, including financial modeling, to provide strategic management to drive marketing and revenue targets. Then, after lunch, you can take responsibility for the delivery of actionable go-to-market plans that efficiently leverage all elements of the marketing mix across all channels within a specified budget.

If you’ve done this before, most likely you’ve got an MBA and a strong background in consumer business marketing (6-10 years). That experience will help you succeed in this role, as well as a clear understanding of the retail channel.

Ready to talk? So are we.

I was amused by the Wikipedia definition of Bogle.

The Bogle is an ancient Scottish mythological creature that has a nasty temper. They are reputed to live for the simple purpose of torturing young children that disobey their mothers, or of punishing those that are lazy, incontinent (lacking self-restraint), or guilty of crimes.

The Bogle is also a creature that loves to vex humans till they go insane! They may cause a human to hear a voice around a corner, only to find that nothing is there, and then repeat the same antics around another corner. This will go on and on until the human decides to give up in utter frustration. Another way they might annoy humans is to enter a person’s house and create a mess, make weird noises, or do other small things that for some reason, always happens at very unopportune times.

The people who know me will have to say how well the definition applies in my case! (The mess part at least may be true. )

JRuby 0.8.3 is now available; I’m excited about a number of the new features and speed improvements.

The follow snippet is from the release notes:
————-

After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You’ve always known a good waterfall-based process is the right way to develop software projects. Come to the Waterfall 2006 conference and see how a sequential development process can benefit your next project. Learn how slow, deliberate handoffs (with signatures!) between groups can slow the rate of change on any project so that development teams have more time to spend on anticipating user needs through big, upfront design.

Attend these valuable tutorials:

• Take Control of Your Team’s Decisions NOW! by Ken Schwaber
• Avoiding the Seven Pitfalls of Lean by Mary Poppendieck
• Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer by Jim Highsmith
• Two-Phase Waterfall: Implementation Considered Harmful by Robert C. Martin
• User Interaction: It Was Hard to Build, It Should Be Hard to Use by Jeff Patton
• FIT Testing In When You Can; Otherwise Skip It by Ward Cunningham
• The Joy of Silence: Cube Farm Designs That Cut Out Conversation by Alistair Cockburn
• wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework by Kent Beck
• Slash and Burn: Rewrite Your Enterprise Applications Twice a Year by Michael Feathers
• Very Large Projects: How to Go So Slow No One Knows You’ll Never Deliver by Jutta Eckstein
• Eliminating Collaboration: Get More Done Alone by Jean Tabaka
• Retrospectives: Looking Back…Looking Aaaall the Way Back by Diana Larsen
• The Glacial Methodology™ Workshop: A Data-Centric Software Development Process by Scott Ambler
• Introduction to Dogmatic Programming by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
• Unfactoring from Patterns: Job Security through Unreadability by Joshua Kerievsky
• Honing Cut-Throat Competition Among Employees: The Art and Science of Forced-Rank Evaluations by Esther Derby
• Making Outsourcing Work: One Team Member per Continent by Babu Bhatt
• User Stories and Other Lies Users Tell Us by Mike Cohn
• Refuctoring by Jason Gorman
• Ruby On Snails: Slow Down Development With This New Framework by Dave Thomas and Mike Clark
• Defect-full Code: Ensuring Future Income with Maintenance Contracts by Kay Pentecost
• Testing: Saving the Best for Last by Lisa Crispin
• …

Because it’s possible you may want to attend all sessions, Waterfall 2006 features no concurrent sessions. All sessions are run sequentially for your enjoyment. However, since in a waterfall process we don’t want testers to know anything about coding, or programmers to know anything about design, and so on, you can only attend sessions that match your job function. When you register to attend you’ll be asked to select an appropriate job function. When sessions that are not relevant to you are running you will be required to sit idle in the lobby.

Michael Cote has some good thinking on what a professional might want out of a “platform” for his or her online professional identity.

Some of the ideas include:

• An RSS feed of events in your network
• A JSON or RSS feed of endorsements you could include in your blog.
• the ability to export your profile as PDF or XML.
• support for microformats in the public profile pages.
• support for FOAF for contact lists.
• integration and synchronization across different social networking sites.

We’re heading for a world in which users will no longer tolerate having their profile data locked up in walled gardens. There is something compelling about a site which actively helps users make their profiles available in the places and formats they want to.

Mark Maunder is once again living the life of an early stage entrepreneur. I’ve enjoyed working with him and will be watching his next venture with interest.

Josh Bancroft, Intel geek blogger, over at Tiny Screenfuls says he is really tired of the cowboy boot ads from the advertising affiliate network he belongs to.

They’re just so out of character for this site! I’m not half so irritated by the lost ad revenue (paltry) as I am by the fact that they’re just so alien to this site, and my lifestyle! :-)

I’ve got an open support ticket with Chitika, which shows a status of “on hold” in their ticketing system. I added a note, asking when it would be addressed.

Untill then, I guess I’ll just have to compulsively post about geeky stuff that has nothing to do with you-know-what, to try to chase them away by sheer nerd volume.

I feel the same about the about the “Celebrity Blogging” and “Advertising Revolution” ads that Adsense puts next to my site. I tried excluding the offending ad sites only to find them replaced with even worse ones.

The wish to be able to select ads that really contribute to the content and community of a blog is part of the motivation for sell side advertising.