I’m a strong believer in the disintermediation of classified ads, which is partially why I chose the name of this blog.

In fact, I heralded Edgeio as a sign of what was to come, especially to the CareerBuilder people I work with.

So, like James Corbett, I was confused by Mike Arrington’s wording of “decentralised job board for tech” , as you can see by my comment on the CrunchNotes post.

Here is the way decentralization for job sites must work.

1. Companies make RSS feeds of their sites available.

2. A decentralized but comprehensive OPML directory of jobs is wrought.

3. The directory is available under an open license.

That’s really all there is to it. And there will still be plenty of ways for service providers to make money.

Now if I were Mike Arrington, I’d continue the lucrative site he’s got. I think that’s great.

In fact, there is nothing wrong with adding those feeds to the Open Job Directory as well. (OPML heads can go to the directory , but it’s all OPML 2.0 inclusion, so you better Grazr it.)
Since the majority of jobs in the Open Job Directory are from paid listing sites, it looks like just another aggregator. But that’s not true. It includes feeds from O’Reilly, Edelman and even Edgeio (OPML) .

And once a critical mass of Businesses are publishing their job feeds, it’ll make those paid-listing sites irrelevant.

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Chicago: http://chi.riverofjobs.com

LA: http://la.riverofjobs.com

SanFran: http://sanfran.riverofjobs.com

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This is New York river of jobs. Other cities and job category specific to come any day. API available if you are ineterested.

http://ny.riverofjobs.com/

In fact this is the whole web page. One Rest call:

note: no line break here. I was having trouble with Wordpress blowing out the template

include_once(’http://freecruiter.org/rest/?method=getFeedListItems
&format=html&countryid=1&stateid=33&cityid=1&jobid=0′);

For fun just change the format=html in the URL to format=rss and you’ve got the rss version of the river for yourself.

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Marc Canter predicts that five more roach motels will open their doors by Christmas, pressured by the clever Facebook move to offer APIs .

It certainly won’t happen by Christmas, but I’ve pleaded with others involved in product development that the Tribune family of newspaper sites offer APIs, especially as we ramp up aggregation and user-generated content.

If newspapers are serious about getting a piece of the social network pie, which includes photos, blogs and video produced and shared by its users, then they had better think about how they are going to share that content back with the network, or else they will also be one step behind, like MySpace is to Facebook.

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The title makes me drowsy.
Kevin Burton of Tailrank has some good advice for Digg :

They’re basically reinventing RSS which just shouldn’t be done. The problem isn’t that Digg can’t do a good job inventing a new format - people already understand RSS. There are already tools that parse RSS and there are cool tools like the RSS validator which don’t work for Digg’s API (but would if they used RSS).

I thought I’d check the facts out first since Kevin could be considered a competitor. It’s definitely true that the marginal benefit they might receive from rolling their own XML is clearly not as great as the loss they will incur by not using RSS.

Kevin continues :

Want to see a good RSS API implementation? Check out Tailrank

Well, if you don’t say so yourself! ; )

But really, it’s true that Tailrank has done a fine job using it’s API with standards like REST and RSS to open it’s data up to the developer community.

It’s also nice to make xml-rpc available as an option for certain things or as an alternative.

I haven’t figured out why most REST advocates tend to think in nouns whereas remote procedures usually are verbs.

In his example, Kevin is using verb-like REST calls. So he is a rebel.

I don’t see any problem with it, but I’m open to be enlightened as to why it might be.

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