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Posts Tagged ‘unemployment’

With the unemployment rate still above 9 percent, a lot of people are hitting the job boards. One set of companies that are growing under these conditions, at least in terms of Website traffic, are the job search engines. But the one that seems to be growing the fastest is Indeed. In July, Monster’s job search engine was up 33 percent in U.S. pageviews, CareerBuilders’ was up 56 percent, and Indeed’s was up 90 percent (comScore).

Not only is Indeed the fastest growing job search engine it is also now the largest in terms of pageviews. In July, it passed CareerBuilder, with 171 million pageviews in the U.S. versus 159 million for CareerBuilder. Yahoo’s HotJobs had 96 million (which Yahoo is reportedly abandoning), Monster had 73 million, and SimplyHired trailed far behind with 26 million.

In terms of unique visitors, CareerBuilder is still larger with 10.1 million in July versus 8.7 million for Indeed, which is No. 2. But Indeed is growing faster in that metric as well (up 76 percent versus 19 percent for CareerBuilder).

All of these numbers are for the core job search at each site, and do not include other parts of their sites such as resumes, advice, or career tools.

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Toobla.

Say it five times fast. Tooblatooblatooblatooblatoobla. There, that was easy wasn’t it. No? It wasn’t easy, you say? Well, repeating the memorable name is the hardest part about using this nifty new visual bookmarking/content sharing web site whose public beta comes to you September 14, straight outta my home town in the heart of “Sili-Corn Valley”—Columbus, OH.

Toobla.com, initially at least, has two main functions: collecting linked content and sharing it with others, visually. In my brief beta test of the site it accomplishes these tasks very well. I know what you are thinking…whoop-dee-doo, there are a million ways to share content these days, right? Probably too many? (YALST—yet another link sharing tool). There most definitely are, but Toobla has a bit of a different paradigm for organizing collected content and it’s worth mentioning it twice—it collects content visually.

Note: Toobla was in the DemoPit of TC50 in 2008

Although somewhat similar to visual book-marker Evernote and visual browser Cooliris, Toobla is simpler conceptually in that there is very little set up required at an account level in order to get started. It is intuitive—you look at the site and just know what to do. I think this is because it uses a familiar “folder” motif for saving thumbnails of web content (whole pages, individual movie clips, links, images). Once collected, you can then share whole folders of content with others, via shortened URL, or by embedding the folder into any website as a widget. The quick, casual nature of this collection method is facilitated through the site’s convenient “bookmarklet” that is a cinch for working quickly and I think that must be Toobla’s main advantage—it really makes it easy to “bookmark first, evaluate later”. That works well for a person like me (who keeps everything of recent importance on the computer desktop).

You can share all sorts of things including little Flash games, widgets, and multimedia. Think of it as an embeddable locker of sorts.

But don’t take my word for it; give it a try! Toobla has made pre-launch accounts available for 1000 lucky CrunchGear/TechCrunch readers. Get signed up by clicking here.

But there is more planned for the public beta launch like implementing Facebook Connect technology and tight integration with Facebook’s activity feed. The service is already integrated with twitter. But there are still even more plans that we will come back to in the near future as I think these guys are really onto something! Stay tuned.

Toobla consists of founder Jake Saxbe, CEO and former Digg VP Brian Link, lead developer Matt Yoho, developer Mike Busch and intern developer Tony Schneider.

By the way, here is a folder of content I have shared as a widget. You can see how a Toobla folder can be a quick snapshot, representing whatever online content you are thinking about at a specific time. In my case it was The Pixies among other things. I noticed a few issues with the widget pop up window (*update - namely that it is not really working right now), but its important to note, this is still in beta. You can see the promise of the technology.

-Jay

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The folks at Gmail always seem to be adding new features that help you organize your life. And the innovation seems to be paying off. Gmail is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S, nudging past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL in July, according to comScore estimates. Today, Gmail has added a small, yet useful addition to its Tasks feature: the ability to email your tasks.

“Email Task List” is now being rolled out as an option under the ‘Actions” tab under Tasks. When you click on “Email Task List” it will open compose email window with the contents of your current task list. You can send your current task lasts or completed task lists to anyone.

Though minor in comparison to other features added to Gmail, the ability to email your Task list can be particularly useful to share both work-related and personal to-do list. But really, shouldn’t every Gmail feature have an email feature from the get-go?

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If your annoyed by TPS reports right now, consider yourself lucky. This week saw the staff reduction of MySpace by 30%, to bring the total number down around 1000 employees. Things dont look good abroad as well.

But the situation might be turning a corner. Last week the U.S. Labor Department issued their Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report. While it showed an increase of 608,000 in jobless claims last week, the number of continuing claims dropped to under 6.7 million.

Here is our layoff tracker, which is updated regularly. If your on the hunt for a new job, CrunchBoard may be the place to find a new opportunity. Check out a snapshot of the jobs available below:

• Sr. Java Engineer
  Cramer Production Business Trust - Norwood, MA

• Senior Brand Strategist
  Red Lever Inc- Santa Monica, CA

• Sr. Front End Developer
  eHarmony - Pasadena, CA

• Member of Technical Staff- Systems
  Kosmix - Mountain View, CA

• Ad Product Manager
  Cirius Technologies,Inc. - Sunnyvale, CA

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Don’t forget we’re looking for a few good hackers here at TechCrunch.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

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I post this because it’s Friday, because it’s freaking hilarious, and because it could be a killer last-minute Father’s Day gift. Go visit ManBabies.com right now. I cannot stop laughing.

Babies are cute, and men are usually normal looking — but when you swap their heads, the results are truly terrifying. ManBabies does just that, both by creating its own images and accepting user submissions for photos that are then voted on by the community. And you can easily share all these pictures via the normal means: Twitter, Facebook, email and you can even embed them.

And they’ll even take your photographs and do the swap for you, if you’re willing to pay them — $15 per Manbaby photo.

If you’re interested in submitting your picture, just like Fight Club, the first rule is the most important one:

1. The picture MUST have both a man and a baby. Man + baby = ManBaby. Get it?

Below find a few of my favorites:

[thanks Adam]

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Google is getting fancy with public data in search results. If you search for “unemployment rate New York” or for any other state or county in the U.S., the first result will be the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics along with a chart. If you click on the link or image it will take you to an interactive chart where you can compare the unemployment rate to other states or counties. For instance, here is New York (8.1%) vs. California (11.5%).

Try it with “population New York” or the name of another state or city, and it will give you the same thing. Google gets that data straight from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division. On the Google Blog, product manager Ola Rosling writes:

The data we’re including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on. Reliable information about these kinds of things exists thanks to the hard work of data collectors gathering countless survey forms, and of careful statisticians estimating meaningful indicators that make hidden patterns of the world visible to the eye.

So expect to see more data visualizations appearing in search results. The technology behind this comes from Google’s acquisition of Trendalyzer from Gapminder a few years back (this is the same technology that powers the motion charts in Google Analytics, by the way). Here is a video with a demo:

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