Thursday, February 06, 2003

BostonWorks - Software Engineer Jobs "Software Engineer Job Listings from BostonWorks and The Boston Globe." [Recently approved feeds from Syndic8.com] This is a great idea. I hope to make our Career Central databases of library-related jobs in the Chicagoland area available via RSS at some point. Ideally, you'd be able to subscribe to a feed of new listings for public library reference jobs, special library jobs, youth services jobs, etc. - your choice. Update: others are way ahead on this one. Ben Hammersley points out Jez Higgins' work in this area using JobServe2RSS: "So you're looking for a new programming job. Maybe you're a contractor, perhaps you've just got itchy feet. There are scads of jobs being advertised on Jobserve, but frankly it's a pain in the backside checking it all the time. Well, through the power of software, you can have this little script do the checking for you. It scrapes Jobserve, generating an RSS feed of the jobs you're interested in. Point your favourite RSS aggregator at it and Bob's your mother's brother. Fresh job ads, delivered to your desktop. It's a Perl script that munges the Jobserve HTML in an RSS 0.91 feed. Set up a scheduled job and fresh job ads are yours. It's available from here (link fixed)." Side note: you can now pre-order Ben's book Content Syndication with RSS! [The Shifted Librarian] 9:26:02 AM

Blogs are conversations. Joi: A Cluetrain Moment. This combination of Google and blogs may create an opinion management and cluetrain manifesto sort of human conversation about products in a much less centralized method than some of the earlier models like epinions. Dig Marc's comments on Joi's blog (scroll down). [The Doc Searls Weblog] 9:22:48 AM

Journalizing Journalism. Chris Gulker: In my mind, the rise of Weblogs parallels events in the 16th Century when one of the first networks - reliable postal service - appeared. Shortly after people like Locke and Galileo and Descartes began writing each other about their discoveries, and then scientific academies formed, where these letters would be read aloud to others who shared an interest. The world has never looked back, since. Think 'Renaissance'. Think 'Industrial Revolution'. I make no claim to be on a par with Galileo, or Locke, or even Doc, for that matter, but I do believe that the global network and easy-to-use Weblog tools, RSS feeds etc. have fundamentally changed authorship. It has been democratized, and pushed down from the small, theoretically-highly-expert, professional cadre that were the norm in broadcast media to include a wider group of both amateur and professional authors who are the norm in peer networks like Weblog communities. This is a good thing, and you saw it operating last Saturday morning, when the Columbia foam-strikes-wing theory emerged on numerous Weblogs, hours before NASA and big media outlets made mention. That theory was stitched together through Weblogs talking, and branching, and picking up informed opinion, eyewitness acounts and media clips. The theory just emerged as interested, thoughtful people put the pieces together: it was like a human parallel processing machine. Bonus links: Craig Burton's The Web Renaissance. That was two years ago, almost exactly. And one year ago, Phil Wolff's Craig Burton wants the world to dance. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 9:20:50 AM