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Too many job boards
This is a post I've been sitting on for a while, but with this week's announcements of a new gig board at 37signals and then the new Cameron Moll-run job board "fire sale", I decided I couldn't take it anymore. With each new niche job board that charges $250 for a 30 day ad it is becoming increasingly clear that the people who build these job boards don't care nearly as much about "connecting companies with talented _______ (fill in blog's target market here)" as they do getting a piece of the easy cash cow that is online job recruiting.
The job market for web people is extremely good right now. In contrast to a few years ago anyway, it seems that all the good designers/developers/pm types already have good jobs leaving the market for good job candidates pretty dry. At my company we've been trying to hire a Sr. User Experience Designer for at least 6 months* with no success. During that time I think we've had maybe a half dozen qualified candidates. I'm sure that other companies are in the same boat. We have placed an add on the 37signals board, excited about the possibility of getting some applicants who actually follow what's going on and at least remotely adhere to the similar principles we do. After the month was up, our job inbox was flooded with 0 applications. If it were my $250 on the line, there was no way I'd try a niche job board like that again. But these boards are counting on the fact that for a large portion of the ads, the people who post them aren't paying for them out of pocket but expensing them to the HR department.
Additionally, does anyone think that the readership of 37signals, Techcrunch, Cameron Moll and GigaOm are really so different that they require their own job boards? Is there a single person who reads Authentic Boredom but does not read Signal vs. Noise or A List Apart? I'd be really surprised. Mike Arrington recently posted about how when he was launching CrunchBoard he tried to partner with Om Malik and 37signals. Apparently both turned him down, and I think that is the biggest reason these will all end up failing. If they had combined into some sort of tech A-list job board it would have been much harder for people to duplicate their formula. But with the setup they have now, if you have a free afternoon you can have a niche job board for your site. While it obviously does not make sense for someone like myself to offer a job board, what about someone like Khoi Vinh, Christopher Fahey, Vitamin (oh wait, they already do), or even 9rules or digg? Where does the law of diminishing returns kick in on something like this? I'm going to guess that the sustainable market for a system like this is one or two job boards per niche. We are already way past that in some fields, and the market is barely half a year old. It feels like the million dollar homepage all over again where there is one great, simple idea and a flood of people rushing to cash in before the jig is up.
* By the way, if you are an awesome ux designer, you should totally come work with me.
Technorati Tags: job board techcrunch 37signals gigaom cameron mollWhat I use: Firefox extensions
Firefox is the greatest internet browser ever. According to my site metrics, 42% of you already know that. This post is for you. (for you 44% Internet Explorer people, get with the program already!) My favorite feature of Firefox is the extensions, which allow you to extend the functionality of Firefox to do pretty much anything you want it to. Here are the extensions I use nearly every day.
- Adblock - The first extension I download onto any new install of Firefox. Block any ad, anywhere. It only takes a little while before you stop seeing ads on the internet at all.
- Google Browser Sync - Powerful new extension that lets you sync your bookmarks, passwords, browsing histories and more across multiple computers.
- FasterFox - I don't really know how much impact this has, but it tweaks various application settings to speed up the downloading and rendering of web pages. Things seem faster, so I keep using it.
- Web Developer - A whole suite of tools essential to anyone who builds for the web. Worth it for the CSS editing and DOM Element info alone.
- Firebug - Really powerful Javascript viewer / debugger. Finally.
- IE View Lite (Windows only) - This contextual menu item makes it easy when you run into that rogue site that only allows IE. Just right-click, select "View in IE", and the page opens in IE. Much more stable for me than the similar IETab
- Colorzilla - A little Photoshop-style color picker you can use to find out just which retina-searing color your little sister is using on her myspace page (hint: it's #0033ff).
- Screengrab - Saves screenshots of full web pages (not just what's visible in the window at the time) to your desktop. I've had mixed results getting it to work on different machines since it uses Java, but when it installs correctly it is a huge time-saver.
- Feed Your Reader - You know that RSS icon that shows up in the address bar? Or the one on this website over on the right? If you use Feed Your Reader, it will automagically send the feed address to your reader of choice when you click on the link. This is a small thing that should be built into Firefox by default.
- Del.icio.us - If you use del.icio.us, you really have to have this extension. For some weird reason I went a year before installing it. Don't be like me.
- Greasemonkey - Finally, if you haven't pimped Firefox out enough, there is greasemonkey. Greasemonkey uses small bits of javascript to alter any web page nearly any way you want. For example, I wrote this script that adds links on Amazon book pages for the book at the Salt Lake City library. If you don't feel like writing your own scripts, there are thousands to choose from at Userscripts.org.
New series: What I use
I am an unapologetic gearhead. A techie. A yak shaver. I'll try nearly any piece of software/website/tool that promises to increase my quality of life in even the most minute way. Just this past weekend rather than putting some much needed time into building my awesome (if I could ever finish it) concert listing website, I played with CakePHP under the justification that if it is as powerful a development framework as I've heard, it will save me soooo much time developing the rest of the site that I really can't afford not to try it. It is a vicious cycle I live in, but I love it.
While I'm quick to try anything once, I'm even quicker to drop a new tool when it does not work out or something better comes along. It with that reasoning I am starting a new series here called "What I use." Basically, each post in the series will feature something that I find valuable and use on a regular basis. Consider me your eager cutting edge crash test dummy.
Technorati Tags: what i useEl Perro Del Mar
Seriously, I am this close to picking up and moving to Sweden right this very second. It baffles me how one little country can make so much great pop music (and if you were not aware that said little country is making so much great pop music, get yourself over to Swedes Please pronto). Case in point is El Perro Del Mar. Carelessly mixing sexy 60's French Pop and Beat Happening-style twee, Sarah Assbring makes pop music the way it is supposed to be: beautiful and sad as hell. There is no U.S. distributer for her self titled album yet but you can import it through Amzazon and her myspace page has 4 songs you can listen to, all of which will be the best thing you listen to all day (and yes, the hyperbole is totally justified here).
MP3 El Perro Del Mar - God Knows (You Gotta Give to Get)
Technorati Tags: music mp3 el perro del mar swedenHow to properly accessorize that new brown Zune of yours
Snuggled somewhere between the iPod updates and the Wii announcements, Microsoft officially let the world in on one of the worst kept product secrets ever: they are indeed making an MP3 player, and her name is Zune. And you can get it in brown. As the attached image indicates, the Zune looks pretty stylish in brown and has a giant screen for showing album art and whatnot. It looks especially nice when you are listening to Band of Horses, whose album cover seems perfectly designed to be in all brown Zune marketing materials. What happens though, when you don’t want to listen to Everything All The Time anymore? !!!’s self-titled album could really make you rethink that whole brown thing real quick. So here is a brief list of records that are both enjoyable to listen to and coordinate well with your fancy new fakepod:
- Magnolia Electric Co. – Fading Trails
- Mates of State – Bring it Back
- Boom Bip - Bue Eyed in the Red Room
- Paul Duncan - Be Careful What You Call Home
- Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
- Neil Young - Harvest
- Tap Tap – Lanzafame
- Page France – Come, I’m a Lion
- Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
- Decemberists – Her Majesty
- The Shins – Oh, Inverted World
- Cat Power – You are Free
- Brian Eno – Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Steve Jobs has some big cajones
Is there anyone else in the world who could take the fact that he just opened a video store that carries only 75 movies (all of which are from the same studio) and have people wet their pants with excitement? Think about it. If a guy opens a video store in your neighborhood with 75 titles, he'd be out of business in a week. Maybe if he had a giant PowerPoint/Keynote slide behind him...
Playing with Windows Live
You may have seen the news that Windows Live has gone, well, live. Windows Live is the new version of MSN Search. If you are like me you wrote off Microsoft's internet search offerings off years ago, and don't even think about going to anywhere but the increasingly monolithic Google for your searching needs. After seeing this Microsoft blog post I decided to go check it out and was surprised to find some sophisticated search features that are ahead of everyone else in the field.
In fact, if Google released half the stuff that is in Windows Live everyone would be tripping over themselves to sing Google's praises. Unfortunately for MS, people care much less about whiz-bang features and care almost exclusively about the quality of the search results (just ask Snap.com, which is about as an impressive display of AJAX-ian excess as you are likely to find). While the search results are far better than previous versions of MSN Search, they are still trying to play catch-up with Google and Yahoo. Until Microsoft gets the same level of innovation out of their search results as they have with their UI, it really won't make a difference how cool the new features are. That said, here are a couple of exciting things I found:
- Macros - I guess these launched back in March, but they are new to me and probably new to you. This a mini-search engine you can create that can filter search terms automatically and return results from a pre-defined list of sites. If you have played with Rollyo, you know how this works. It seems a lot easier than Rollyo though to me. I made a test Macro of mp3 blogs I read. One nice feature is permanent URLs for your Macros, so you can share them like this: My MP3 blog macro. Your Macros also show up as a filter for your search results in the tool bar. Pretty slick.
- Related Searches - A small thing, but come on. It's 2006 and Google still won't ask me when I search for "jaguar" if I'm asking about a cat or a car.
- Image Search - All that talk up there about kicking Google's butt in the UI department? This is what I was talking about. Check out Google vs. Windows Live. I especially like the "scratchpad" feature and the roll-over meta data. Not so sure about the scrollbar though.
- Windows Live Local - Wow, that name is really Microsoftian. If I were a developer and built something as awesome as Windows Live Local, I'd be pretty upset at the marketing genius that named that. Or marketing robot, which is highly probable. Bad name aside, here is another product that simply blows away Google's version. This maps tool is way more powerful than I realized. It has similar quality maps to Google and Yahoo, but there are a series of tools that make Local stand out. You can annotate and share maps, draw multi-point maps (something I've wanted to do in Google Maps for forever), and add local search results to your map. Performance seemed to suffer a little bit with all the dragging and dropping and animating, but I wasn't testing this on the fastest machine in the world.
So have I become a Windows Live convert? Probably not. Old habits are hard to break, but I'm certainly going to be using Windows Live more over the next couple of weeks and will see how it goes. Regardless of how much market share this helps Microsoft capture from Google and Yahoo, it's nice to see them stretching a bit and coming out with some innovative products. It's almost enough to make me interested in what they have in store for Vista. Almost ;)
Technorati Tags: internet technology search Microsoft windows liveSean Lennon
Over the years (especially the pre-internet ones), I have discovered new music in some pretty weird places. My first exposure to the Pixies was in the car of a church leader, I found Guided By Voices through part of a flyer for a show that had happened over a year earlier, and I discovered Sean Lennon in a Gary Fisher bicycle catalog. Seriously. It was probably 1997, and in the background of a shop photo was Lennon's first record Into the Sun with a little footnote that said it was the best record of the year. Since I had no reason to believe Gary Fisher would lie to me, I bought it even though I really couldn't care less for the Beatles and/or Yoko Ono. You may or may not have heard Into the Sun, but it really was one of the best records that year. Lennon didn't release anything else until this month when he returned with Friendly Fire.
Over the past eight years I kind of forgot about Sean Lennon, but when I heard he had a new record coming out I dusted off Into the Sun and remembered just how awesome it was. Friendly Fire is a really strong follow-up and has a much more consistant feel to it than his debut. Also it just occured to me that being John Lennon's son really has to be the worst possible thing at times for an aspiring musician. So rather than tell you it sounds like Lennon & McCartney solo material, I'm going to say it sounds more like XO era Elliot Smith (although that really sounds like Lennon & McCartney solo material too...).
Technorati Tags: music mp3 sean lennonBig updates coming on the ol' blog
Yes, it has been ghostly quiet around here this summer. I'd like to say that I've been hard at work on various breathtaking projects (I have), but there are two real reasons for the recent silence: the first is that I have reached a point where the topics I want to write about are shifting. In case you haven't noticed, my posts fall into roughly two camps: the mp3 posts and the Internet posts. Although I'm sure that you love each and every precious post, it is not hard to imagine that there is a person out there who really likes the mp3 posts (I do have excellent taste you know) but could care less about all this Web2.0 jackjawing. If I had to guess, I'd say about 75% of you are here for the mp3s, and that's cool. I like posting them, you like listening to them. So to save you the trouble of being bored out of your minds I'll be chunking stuff up into their respective categories so you can get the stuff you want. There are also some other (hopefully) cool things coming too that I am pretty excited about. I've started with the redesign, so if you see anything all busted up, let me know.
The second reason I have not been writing is that after holding out for over 2 years, I am hopelessly addicted to World of Warcraft. It is pathetic and I am pretty sure my wife will be leaving me any day now. I feel much better now that this dirty secret is out in the open.