Congrats to my former coworkers over at Jobster for shipping thebiz.variety.com, a career network for the entertainment industry on behalf of Variety.

Over on the Jobster blog there’s information on how to become a Jobster affiliate. 

Affiliates are paid $1 per job inquiry and $0.50 for each profile creation that results from their site.

Rather than a pre-rendered Javascript widget, affiliates receive an XML feed of jobs which they can mix into their site content in any fashion they wish. This is a higher technical barrier to entry but allows the jobs to be deeply integrated into the site to maximize revenues.

The new Jobster app on Facebook launched while I was on vacation, so I didn’t have a chance to blog about it earlier, an omission I will now address.

Technically, the Jobster Facebook app is an interesting example of a web services mashup that seamlessly combines three different technologies. 

• The companies and subscriptions in the Jobster Sourcing Tools application are exposed as REST resources using restlets, (implemented in J2EE, Spring, and Hibernate). 
• These resources are consumed by the consumer-oriented Jobster.com site (implemented in Rails)
• Jobster.com integrates this data with the Facebook sites using the Facebook API (implemented in PHP)

Below are screenshots of some of the key features of the Jobster Facebook app.

1,  The job search form searches millions of jobs from across the web, automatically suggesting jobs for you based work experience in your Facebook profile.

2. “Join Talent Networks” provides a categorized list of companies that have talent networks on Facebook, powered by Jobster. Facebook Users can get the inside scoop on jobs from these companies by subscribing to email updates.

3. The “Ask for advice” page slices your Facebook network by where they’ve worked, as a way to help you find career advice and connections when jobseeking.

3. The “Online Resume” page allows Facebook users to create a compelling online that showcases their skills and experiences, using their Facebook work and education history to get started easily.

It’s gratifying to note employers are reporting good growth of their talent networks on Facebooks in the initial weeks the application has been available; .

It’s pretty cool, give it a try or if you’re an employer, learn how to build your own talent network on Facebook using Jobster.

1-800-GOOG-411 is a very cool Google service, currently in Google Labs, that provides free voice 411 using high quality voice recognition and speech synthesis.  To use it, just dial that number from any phone and say the city. state and business you’re looking for.  

Here’s a sample voice session from DownloadSquad:

1-800-GOOG-411 joins 1-800-FREE-411 from Jingle Networks and Tellme’s mobile 411 app. 

1-800-FREE-411 already controls six percent of the US mobile directory market.  Tellme’s application allow users to search using their voice and interact with the results on their phone’s screen; Tellme was recently acquired by Microsoft.

All of these applications are signs of the coming collapse of the walled garden that carriers have traditionally enacted around voice and data services, spurred by advances in mobile phone platforms and the reduced cost of VOIP and voice recognition applications. 

The aggressive positions being staked out by Google and Microsoft in the mobile data services space will undoubtedly disrupt the carriers’ business models. 

That’s great news for customers’ wallets– carriers formerly used their virtual monopoly over the customer to charge $1.25 for directory assistance. 

It’s also great news for innovation and the growth of a mobile services ecosystem. Carriers have the potential to offer tremendously valuable mobile services to their users, and tremendously valuable data to advertisers, but have lacked the technical firepower to effectively do either. In the end, for the more enlightened carriers, the disruption caused by open mobile platforms and data services will work to their benefit as well.

Google’s announcement that they are discontinuing support for their Search API has added urgency to the development of open search platforms. 

Alexa and Nutch approach the problem from different directions, each of them interesting. 

Alexa provides a hosted, scalable search service that you pay for; you can access their full-text index of their web, distributing computations across their cloud, and creating new indices to capture the results of those computations. Costs are modest. 

Our goal is to give unparalleled and unlimited access to search. Just think of it… where else can you:

• Take the reins of a Web crawler and direct it to crawl specific pages on specific domains and collect specific document types
• Mine the documents in the crawl and generate custom indices
• Reorder search results and create custom verticals
• Use your own advertising solution

This is by no means a complete list. I just put it together to illustrate a point.

Where other search engines may give you access to their search results, they will tie your hands. You won’t be able to access the raw documents in their crawl, create your own index, reorder the results or even use your own advertising solution. In some extreme cases they will only provide results if you give over part of your page to their ajax script. Why would these search giants create search solutions that are obviously limited and of little use to inventors? Because they are not interested in helping to create their next competitor.

Alexa on the other hand… that’s exactly what we are here to do. We are here to build a platform for you. We are designing our services to be consumed and manipulated by developers and inventors. We fully expect that the next great search engine will be unimaginable to us and won’t be based on a plain vanilla search index from one of the big boys. It will be built and based on a new idea and it will require the kind of access that only Alexa can provide.

You can get started in the new and revamped Developer’s Corner.

Nutch, on the hand, is a fully open source web search engine; the work of creating a cloud to run Nutch on is up to you or a partner:

Web search is a basic requirement for internet navigation, yet the number of web search engines is decreasing. Today’s oligopoly could soon be a monopoly, with a single company controlling nearly all web search for its commercial gain. That would not be good for users of the internet.

Nutch provides a transparent alternative to commercial web search engines. Only open source search results can be fully trusted to be without bias. (Or at least their bias is public.) All existing major search engines have proprietary ranking formulas, and will not explain why a given page ranks as it does. Additionally, some search engines determine which sites to index based on payments, rather than on the merits of the sites themselves. Nutch, on the other hand, has nothing to hide and no motive to bias its results or its crawler in any way other than to try to give each user the best results possible.

The Jobster team shipped a number of new features for professionals last night, as described by Jason.  

Personalized url.  Now, every jobster user can have their own personalized url. 

        [phil writes: mine is http://www.jobster.com/people/philbo]

Get your own by visiting your home page on jobster.  Having your own personalized url on jobster is an easy way to direct people to your career profile, whether you are looking for a job, hiring, or just networking for your career.  Act fast to get yours before someone else claims it.

Personalized home page.  Now, every registered jobster user gets their own personalized homepage with real-time suggestions of jobs that match their interests and experiences.  To see this feature, you will need to create a free jobster account.

Video profiles.  This is a feature that we’ve received many requests for and are now doing some in-production testing with. 

Video profiles are a hot topic of late, as noted here in the Wall Street Journal and here on NPR.  Many of us also remember the story of Aleksey Vayner and his misfire here as well.

In our first implementation of video profiles, any Jobster user can add a YouTube video to their Jobster profile.  For instance, you can see mine here. This is a potentially great way for candidates to stand out by posting a video resume. We’ve also had a lot of interest from employers in using this feature to post videos about what it’s like to work at their companies or in their particular groups, or to just better explain what they are looking for in a candidate. 

We’ll see how this one develops.  A recent poll i conducted on this blog found that 4 out of 10 people would be interested in adding video to their career profile (higher than expected), and that there was considerable interest in posting video resumes and/or videos about what it’s like to work at a company.  Again, we’ll see how this one goes…  

David Brin has an interesting response to Time’s decision to vote “you” (as in the You of YouTube and the internet) as Person of the Year.  He argues that this designation is premature, because today’s net is not an “arena” or a commons. 

Brin’s post is frustratingly incomplete in some ways, however, because he fails to discuss explicitly the existing mechanisms for identifying quality on the internet, be they collaborative (e.g. Digg) or technical (e.g. Google). More on that latter, first let me quote from his arguments.

The internet, writes Brin, is a great platform for self expression, but it lacks the cultural norms and institutions that allow true quality to rise to the top, as seen in older institutions such as markets, the scientific process, courts and democracy. (I like the way Brin has highlighted the common traits in all of these institutions.)

Some of you have read my extensive essay - written for the American Bar Association - about the underlying common traits of markets, science, courts and democracy — the “accountability arenas” that have empowered free individuals to compete and create without tumbling quickly into repression and outrage…. for the first time, ever. Alas, over the years since, I have found that people have trouble perceiving some of what the paper describes… or why today’s internet just does not yet have what it takes to empower us with a “fifth arena.”

Here is one of the key difficult concepts. I describe how markets, science, courts and democracy each have “centripetal vs centrifugal” social phases.

I see these opposite trends having much the same effect for accountability arenas that INHALING and EXHALING have in living mammals. You need both for the system to thrive.
In science, markets, courts and democracy, the CENTRIFUGAL PHASE is when each individual participant may disperse, find allies/collaborators, and safely organize with others under some degree of protection, in a zone where product can be refined and readied for competitive testing.

In science, this zone is your tenured professorship or lab etc: in markets the safe zone is the company/corporation: in courts it is attorney-client privilege and the power of coerced deposition; and democracy has parties.

That’s the centrifugal phase and it took civilization thousands of years to realize how necessary it is, in order for these four arenas to function.

Note that this is the phase that exists now, copiously, in the nascent “fifth arena” of the internet!

The key lacking in the internet are formalized processes and safeguarded institutions that place competing ideas in competition with each other and allow the better idea to win.

What the cybersphere does NOT have is anything even remotely resembling the CENTRIPETAL phase that also empowers the four older, more mature “arenas.”

What is the centripetal phase? This is where in all of the disparate and dispersed participants in an arena are summoned together by a ritual CALL TO COMBAT. What ensues is a battle - competition - that has transformed ancient human bloody-mindedness into something much more like a game. One in which rules have been laid down to ensure that the outcome of competition correlates at least somewhat with quality of product, and much less with power or influence or other means of cheating.

In science the centripetal competition phase compels researchers to publish papers and present them for criticism. In markets the ritual battleground is retail sales - where customers compare goods and services. In democracy the role is filled by elections, and courts have trials.

Presently, on the internet, THERE IS NO EQUIVALENT CENTRIPETAL PHASE that allows us to test ideas, opinions, arguments against each other, using competitive processes to cull wheat from the chaff.

Pearls are said to float upward in shit. But so MUCH of the ranting online today is BS, how can anyone hope for good ideas to actually coalesce and for bad ones to finally die, as they eventually deserve?

Brin overstates his case a bit too much here, although I think his overall conclusions still stand. 

Collaborative filtering sites like Digg do provide a way for better ideas to rise to the top, but their algorithms for selection are hidden and can be gamed or subverted from within.

Likewise, Google has a metric for quality based on sifting through the linking behavior of millions of pages, but this metric is opaque and shifting. Google has mixed motives given that they are also trying to increase their own Adsense revenue and deliver value to shareholders.   (There has been some controversy in this area already, see Google Pimps Own Services in Search Results on Google Blogoscoped.)

To attempt to complete Brin’s (David’s, not Sergei’s!) thought: There are clearly mechanisms for finding quality on the internet, in some ways uniquely powerful, but not institutions for doing so. 

By institutions, I mean systems that have a degree of underlying stability and trustworthiness based on history, checks and balances, transparency, and so forth. Such institutions take a great deal of time to evolve and are at least as much social as technical in nature, often requiring multiple revolutions and upheavals before being solidly established. Perhaps its unrealistic to expect secure institutions of quality and competition would evolve in internet time, even on the internet.

Update: There is some discussion of different forms of internet filtering in the comments section, with responses from Brin. Here’s one such response:

Rob asks: “Are any of those examples of centripetal force?” and cites crude reputation-based systems. And yes, such systems do provide a very very coarse and primitive quality feedback methodology…

…roughly equivalent to “democratic elections” based on screaming matches or court trials by public lynching. Worse, of course, because there is simply no way for bad opinions to lose so much standing that they simply wither up and blow away. Freedom of speech is great, but that right was established in part in ORDER to secure, forever, the benefits of the centrifugal phase. CRITICISM is the centripetal tool that corresponds, and for it to work at the pragmatic goal of providing us all with improved human solutions it must be applied in sophisticated and effective ways!

I tried to explain all this at Google, a few weeks ago. Very smart guys. I think maybe two of them sort of dimly got it. It is HARD, apparently.

Brin seems to suggest that this is more of a “tools” issue than a social one.

Well… I don’t agree that the tools are there, at all. In fact, this appears to have been the obsession that has pulled me away from science fiction for many years. My holocene invention, reputation management, attention management, transparency, indignation addiction, prediction registries… I have been probing at a wide variety of tools that are desperately needed — and that currently are languishing for lack of serious attention out there. All of them are pieces to a puzzle that could bring us a mature, fifth accountability arena… and nearly all of them are simply missing.

Based on a tip from Russell Williams, I’ve played a little bit with acts_as_ferret and like what I see so far.   

Ferret is a port of the Lucene full-text engine for Ruby, and acts_as_ferret is a plugin for Rails that makes it easy to make any ActiveRecord model full-text searchable. 

Roman Mackovcak provides a set of ferret recipes, including how to do pagination, which is not supported out of the box. 

Ferret supports the same rich query syntax that Lucene does and can read files created using standard Lucene without conversions. Some of the supported query syntax options include wildcard searches (te?t matches test), fuzzy matching based on Levenshtein distance (dictonary~ matches dictionary), proximity searches, range searches, keyword weight, and boolean operators.

Update: Dion notes that Ferret no longer uses the Lucene file format, unfortunately.. The file format was changed in order to improve performance.

To accompany the rumored renewal of affections between Brad and Jen, eWeek is reporting a thaw in the chill between Hibernate and Spring:

Despite an often tense relationship between leaders in their respective open-source communities, the Spring and JBoss leaders are now talking about a truce.

Rod Johnson, chief executive of Interface21, the company that maintains the Spring Framework, told eWEEK that he would welcome an opportunity to work with JBoss. Johnson spoke with eWEEK just weeks after JBoss leader Marc Fleury told eWEEK he was open to working with the Spring community in some fashion.

The apparent thaw in the often chilly relationship could signal a big boon to Java developers who use the Spring Framework with JBoss’ Hibernate technology. Spring is a lightweight Java application framework that helps developers avoid the complexity of the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), while Hibernate is an object/relational persistence and query service for Java.

Reporting the conflict from the frontlines was Jobster’s senior war correspondant Scott Haug: 

The height of the friction between the two camps was perhaps best captured in a blog post from last year by Scott Haug, a developer at Jobster, entitled “Hibernate Hates Spring.”

However, many developers who posted comments to Haug’s post said they use both Spring and Hibernate, and many called for a truce.

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.