Feedster is currently beta testing a new offering that allows you to do a job search against RSS feeds of job listings syndicated directly from employers.
Wow!
$500MM deep in CareerBuilder, the newspaper industry now has yet another form of competition for one of its core revenue streams; employment classifieds.
Sure, Feedster’s beta implementation is a shell of what you get at the big job sites (due mostly, I suspect, to the unstructured data it’s working with), but that’s fairly easily corrected… anyone who can generate an RSS feed can either add internal (i.e., text) formatting hints to help Feedster… or better yet, develop a schema/DTD that structures key search parameters (location, salary range, industry, etc).
This is one to watch.
We’re working solely with RSS on the inbound side so it’s reasonably good semi-structured data. The site is underfeatured since it only took Scott Johnson a few hours to throw it together. There are few significant improvements that we can make once he schedules a full day for it.
What’s really going on in certain vertical topic areas like jobs is that RSS and the tools that use it well are destroying the economies of scale for large destination sites. Any small recruiter can post a job feed, get it included in Feedster, and have the reach of the large sites. Even better, anybody with a good idea of how to build online recruiting software can simply use Feedster Jobs as a web service and go compete on a features basis with the big guys as they wish.
Scott Rafer, CEO
Feedster
Heh. thanks Tony (Scott Johnson from Feedster (I build Jobs) here). The ability of RSS + a service like Feedster to say ‘go out on the web and gather me what ***I*** really want’ is incredibly powerful. Effectively an aggregator + Feedster amounts to a “Content Router”. And we all know that routing technology has been a rather large business …