i have a few issues to catch up on related to the job feeds, after out of town all morning. first, john robb pointed out that job feeds is doing page scraping, which is of questionable legality. i emailed monster before i started this, but i never heard back from them. i will take it down if they don't like it, but the source has already been copied. i assume rssjobs.com will run into such issues before i will, because they're actually charging money to reformat someone else's data (i assume) without permission. john's suggestion was that this should be a desktop application, and ideally someone will eventually write some desktop job search applications, but i can imagine a variety of ways in which you might want to use the feeds. i don't want to lock this content directly into a single use by making the feeds inseparable from the presentation.
jon udell continues to raise interesting issues. he writes:
But there's a chicken-and-egg problem. You can't do the RDF experiment until there are interesting amounts of metadata floating around. But if we say that all metadata that can benefit from RDF must first be expressed in RDF, it's kind of a non-starter.
that was my initial thinking when i said in jon's comments that this will all be worthless if someone doesn't build the applications to read this metadata. but i've since changed my mind. RDF can encode metadata in a variety of ways such that we can selectively choose which data will be visible to an application unaware of the metadata. this means that a user of a standard RSS reader shouldn't even notice if i start sticking metadata into my RSS feed, either as descriptions of existing text, or as additional information.
so here's the plan for me: 1) design a feed that looks pretty much like the existing RSS job feed until you look at the source, and then you'll see that the job information is all marked up with RDF. 2) write myself an XML-based resume. 3) design an application to filter the RSS/RDF job feed down to jobs that match (in some yet to be determined way) the data in my resume. 4) ??? 5) get a job.