Most forms of online advertising have grown increasingly sophisticated in terms of the ability to target desired audiences precisely and to track and tune campaigns for effectiveness.

With our latest release of Jobster employer, we come one step closer to bringing this level of sophistication to online job advertising.

Direct Post is a simple but valuable job distribution system that will be especially interesting to smaller businesses. With a single click, employers can advertise their jobs both to their own talent networks and to Craigslist, Googlebase, and America’s Job Bank.

Direct Post is tightly integrated with the rest of the Jobster sourcing platform, so companies can easily manage incoming prospects in a unified “inbox” and measure the effectiveness of different source of talent in real time.

Direct Post is job distribution “for the rest of us”. Job distribution tools have traditionally been sold as add-ons to applicant tracking systems and targeted at enterprises. Even at the enterprise level, only about 50% of companies use job distribution tools; the usage rate is even lower for smaller companies. We’re working to create a single end-to-end solution that is instantly accessible and valuable to any company.

Our experience thus far shows a number of companies seeing quick results. (At the moment, Craigslist handily trounces the Googlebase and AJB in terms of effectiveness, though as Google increasingly promotes Google Base content on Google itself we might see some shifts in those trend.)

Naturally, the average quality level of prospects who come in without a referral is not going to be as high as those who do, which is why the system allows employers to track the source of each prospect, as well as helping prospects to get connected to the company and obtain a referral.

In terms of technology, Scott and Morgan have carefully designed the architecture of the system so that we can very easily plug in new destinations and scale to very large numbers of postings.

In later releases, we will continue to layer on new venues for targeting advertising that will offer unique value in terms of ROI and the ability to target passive professionals, as well as increase the ability of the system to automatically choose the right portfolio of advertising investments.

Via Google Blogscoped:

We get some amusement out of the inaccurate but catchy “Myspace for the Workplace” label that the media likes to apply.

With that in mind, we found the Daily Show Trendspotting segment on Myspace especially amusing.

Our friends at Snapvine are in the news:

Snapvine, which this week unveiled an application that allows individuals to post personalized voice comments to their MySpace pages, recently scored more than $2 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an early investor in Skype, and First Round Capital, the venture fund of Half.com founder Josh Kopelman. Russell Siegelman, a former Microsoft Corp. executive and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, also is an individual investor and board member.

“It is adding voice to social networking,” explains Siegelman, who was attracted to Snapvine’s team of engineers. “I just think there are a lot of untapped innovations yet to come that integrate the Web and voice.”

Snapvine has attracted some top-notch talent, including Curtis Vredenburg, one of the first employees at Ask Jeeves, and Rob Frederick, who previously led Amazon.com’s Web services group. The six-person company, which has been keeping a low profile for the past few months, just moved into new office space in Belltown.

See new job openings at Snapvine and what people are saying about Snapvine on Jobster.

Jason writes:

i was out on john connors’ boat in lake washington tonight and an errant move found me overboard…prada shirt, prada shoes, blackberry and all.

the blackberry going down, of course, was the absolute worst part.

ceo loses his crack for a few minutes and is just in pain.

My coworker Ariel Stallings writes about a movie shoot that took place in the Jobster offices in Pioneer square:

My former movies.com colleague Mike Standish is making a short romantic comedy called Fortune Hunters. One of the scenes called for a “hip dot com office” set … so where’d they come to film? JOBSTER!

Version 3.30 of the Berry411 mobile search tool is now available from the Berry411 download page.

The new version remembers the name and phone number of any business you call or add to your phone book using Berry411. The next time you search for the business, you can call the business directly from the search history without having to hit the web at all, or go directly to the driving directions and details page for that business without having to scroll through other results.

This means that getting information for your favorite businesses is even faster.

[You can see that the end game is that the local address book, local search, and search history blend into one seamless experience, though we still have a way to go before getting there. From a technical standpoint, the interesting feature in this release is the ability to update the Berry411 client search history from the B411 web site (but not any other web site, for security reasons.) I am toying with the idea of creating address packs that would populate your address book and/or search history with useful sets of businesses, such as the 800 numbers of all the US airline carriers for instance. Going with a flexible browser + scripting language approach for the results makes this sort of thing trivial to add.]

Jason provides a good look at the Jobster Employer product

a lot of folks have been asking me over the past couple of days what it is that employers actually buy when they purchase jobster and how we justify the prices.  here’s one blogger for instance asking the same thing.

so, here goes with the explanation.

when employers purchase jobster, they are buying the jobster for employers service.  each employer using jobster gets a web-based dashboard for their recruiters to use to manage their sourcing of candidates through a number of high impact channels.  jobster helps recruiters create online ads for their jobs and then get those ads to places like social networks, websites, blogs, googlebase, craiglist, and to custom portals like diversity websites.

here is a screenshot of what that jobster for employers dashboard looks like.  this is the 14th release of an online application for sourcing that we’ve been working on for nearly 3 years now with daily input from thousands of recruiters. 

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It has been gratifying to see the attention and usage that our recent updates to the Jobster site have been receiving. As usage increases, we’re working set the right tone and standards so that the community will be valuable to everyone who participates.

Recently, the new site was covered in the Wall Sttreet Journal, CNN (streaming video), the front page of Digg, and the Washington Post.

People are discovering innovative ways to express what’s unique about their company culture, whether it’s Eric talking about what’s unique about an established leader like Bose, or Joe talking about the up-and-coming startup Snapvine. In comparison,, using HR boilerplate to talk about a company comes off looking stale and uncompelling.

We’re working to develop and document a set of community standards that encourages authentic answers about companies while discouraging unverifiable hearsay, prepackaged corporate advertisements, and personal attacks. We draw some metaphorical inspiration from the standards of communities such as the Wikipedia.

For example, although it wouldn’t make sense to go as far as Wikipedia’s standard of verifiability, we encourage answers that include a factual component that can be verified in addition to personal opinions.

These facts are often neither “good” nor “bad” in and of themselves, the real measure is in the eye of the reader. (Consider private offices vs. open plan, city vs. suburban, big company vs. small, or flat vs. hierarchical organization.) Answers that capture the unique details of each company really are more useful and more likely to sell the company to the right people than unsubstantiated emotions or advertisments.

Not all verifiable facts will be positive for all readers, of course. It might come out in an answer that a company does not provide child care, for instance, and for some prospective employees this could be a deal breaker. Revealing this fact in a forum such as Jobster is not inappropriate or unfair, since these facts end up being uncovered in the interview process anyway.

On the balance, we believe that a balanced and informed look at companies benefits both companies and jobseekers through better career matches.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia has started Campaigns Wikia, dedicated to making politics more intelligent and participatory:

For more than 50 years now, we have been living in the era of television politics. In the 1950s television first began to have a major impact on politics, and the results were overwhelming.

Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let’s be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.

Campaigns have been more about getting the television messaging right, the image, the soundbite, than about engaging ordinary people in understanding and caring how political issues really affect their lives.

Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics.

One hallmark of the blog and wiki world is that we do not wait for permission before making things happen. If something needs to be done, we do it. Well, campaigns need to sit up and take notice of the Internet, take notice of bloggers, take notice of wikis, and engage with us in a constructive way.

Technology has an interesting dual-faced influence on the complexity and quality of conversation. It can be used to broadcast the same message to millions, homogenizing conversation and creating groupthink and failures of crowd intelligence. Or it can amplify the ability of individuals to participate in meaningful conversations, as seen in wikis and blogging. It’s a welcome development to see someone building a technical and social platform for more meaningful political conversation.