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.

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Typepad is the most powerful yet easy to use blogging service around.  period.

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?