If you check out Jobster Labs, you’ll see that the page now includes an unfiltered feed of recent blog posts from Jobster developers.  (Naturally, the feed is available in HTML, RSS, and Atom flavors.)

Our goal here is to marketing the company to prospective employees .  In some circles “marketing” is a dirty word, but our intent here is to provide an authentic, uncensored picture of what it’s actually like to work at Jobster, both the good and the bad.  The collected blogs provide a better picture of what makes us tick than any resume or essay could do.

Jeff, for instance, talks about Ruby on Rails and how we’re using it as a complementary platform to our Java + Spring + Hibernate + Oracle platform for situations where speed of development and rapid iteration is essential.  Pretty cool.  But Jeff also talks about how Complexity Kills and how some projects at Jobster suffer from excessive complexity. 

We believe that a picture that’s all positive isn’t credible, and that by providing a more balanced picture an employer becomes more, not less, attractive. 

Some of you might be interested in creating an aggregate feed of blogs from your own company.  We’ll probably introduce this functionality as a web service that anyone can use, but until then the Ruby source code that generates the feeds is available here.    (I wrote this quickly and am still a Ruby newbie so please forgive any imperfections in the code.) 

We have an hourly cron job set up to update the static feed files; the HTML version is included in the Jobster labs page via PHP.  I found the Ruby FeedTools library to be an excellent tool for both parsing and creating RSS and atom feeds.

Links are the essence of the web. They create conversations in the blogosphere and define relevance in search.

Links are changing the way people write and probably the way they think too– a world with content but no links is like a world with noun but no verbs.

Linking is so important that blogging tools like ecto or performancing provide numerous tools for creating links based on the browsing history, search results, flickr photos, and so forth.

What does all of this have to do with email clients? Today, very little, and that’s my point. Outlook, Thunderbird, GMail and every other email client I’ve tried, whether web or PC based, has only the most rudimentary tools for creating and importing hyperlinks.

If linking to the web is difficult in email, it’s even more difficult to link to other email messages. The reply thread is a primitive kind of linking, but just try referencing two different email threads in a message.  This is a real shame, because especially in business communication, links are extremely useful for providing data and background for the points in the email.

Email clients should make it at least as easy as blogging clients to create links based on where you’ve been, the results of a keyword search, feeds, and data in the corporate intranet.

Increasing the quantity and quality of linking in the intranet, and providing the ability to search over those links, would allow Google-like relevance algorithms to be applied to intranet pages. Then maybe we’ll be able to find relevant information as easily in our little intranets as we do on the internet at large.