Michael Arrington introduces the Crunchboard Job Site, designed to create a more efficient ecosystem for connecting Techcrunch readers who are hiring and looking for work:

A good percentage of emails coming to me every day are from people asking me which companies are hiring, or from companies asking me if I know someone who would be a good fit for a job.

I keep a separate email folder with these emails and introduce people as often as possible. But this isn’t a scalable system, and I wanted to do more to match companies with people. So we built a job board and launched it today at CrunchBoard.com. Now these people can connect directly.

Our goal with CrunchBoard is to build the ultimate web insiders network. A thirty day ad costs $200. I’ll consider CrunchBoard a success if we manage to put the right people together and make the entire ecosystem a little more efficient.

Techcrunch joins the 37signals job board, which charges $250 for a 30 day posting.

These ultra-targeted job boards are signs of a general trend towards more distributed and targeted ways to advertising jobs on the internet.

Companies are realizing that they can get a better ROI and less resume spam by targeting relevant jobs to the right audiences. Publishers are realizing that they can deliver real value to their community by helping to connect the right people with the right jobs, as well as increasing revenues.

In order for this new ecosystem to really take off at a large scale, a goodly amount of technological heavy lifting is required. The following are all things we can expect to see in the next few years:

1. Standards for automated posting of jobs, as well as technology that hides the inconsistencies between different destinations. The Atom and RSS based formats specified by Google Base are examples of emerging standards for representing job postings.
2. More intelligence to help select the right advertising venues for jobs. A certain portion of jobs advertised in a venue will be both posted by and read by members of the community, but other jobs will come from outside the community and will need to be correctly targeted to that community.
3. More relevance and personalization in the display of jobs within the community job board. The selection of jobs a particular user sees in the community job board should be seen as highly relevant based on context and history.
4. The integration of community and networking with job search. As Arrington says, Techcrunch is working to build an insiders network, not just a traditional classifieds business.

Version 0.7.2 of the Arachno Ruby IDE is now available for download.

As I’ve mentioned before, Arachno is my Ruby IDE of choice..

As always, Arachno supports fast editing, indexed full text search, easy debugging of Ruby and Rails apps, and gem and class browsing.

In addition to a number of bug fixes, the following are the key new features I’ve noticed so far in the new version.

1. Scriptability: You can extend the IDE using scripts in Ruby, Python, or PHP to add custom behavior around keystrokes or events like opening files.

2. Smalltalk style interactivity: There is an interactive console built into the application. Rather than working in a line by line mode, you can enter multiple lines and press Ctrl-E to evaluate the expression. There is an option to reload all modified files whenever the console is reactivated so that you can always interact with up to date classes.

3. Filewatcher window: This allows you to tail one or more files (Rails log files, for exampl)

4. A real help file

5. Support for Ruby 1.8.4

Arachno is built by a small company called Scriptolutions in West Germany, headed by Lothar Schultz. Perhaps because of its origins in a small team, its refreshingly free of bloat or complexity, and has a generous 24 month free upgrade policy. Scriptolutions is also very responsive. I’ve filed a bug using their automated tracking tool after a crash and had a direct email from Lothar shortly after informing me of a fix.

Users of Berry Bloglines should notice snappier performance after a port to Ruby on Rails from the older CGI scripts, whose overhead had grown too high under increased load.

Tech notes:
The new implementation uses ruby-bloglines. Compared with the Universal Feed Parser, Ruby Bloglines currently has some limitations. It doesn’t handle ill-formed XML and rather than meaningful objects it returns nested hashes with some inconsistent structures.

Unfortunately, Bloglines is an example of a site that doesn’t generate valid XML! For instance, ampersands in feed titles or descriptions are not escaped as & causing a non-lenient XML parser to blow up. Although I won’t complain as harshly as Tim Bray does about invalid XML, I do hope the Bloglines team can clean this up as it makes life difficult.

A better RSS parsing option might be Ruby FeedTools or perhaps something built on top of RubyfulSoup, but the bloglines web services interface would need to be modified to use it.