Is Mike losing his Edgeio?

Mike Arrington, one of the brains behind Edgeio, recently launched a new job board - the latest play from the Crunch stable. Now he's suggesting that other small players, like 37 Signals and GigaOm Jobs, should join forces with him in creating what he calls a "decentralised job board for tech".

"I imagined an API for entering jobs, and an API for outputting jobs, that could be displayed anywhere.... I think we should create a single widget that shows all of the jobs listed by 37 Signals, Om and CrunchBoard... We also need to allow other websites to join the network and get a fair revenue split (real: large majority) for bringing listings or potential employees to the service".

What I don't get is how Mike can apply the term 'decentralised' to such a setup. Its more like distributed pockets of centralisation.  Eventhough I've (rather pedanticly) argued previouly that Edgeio isn't a true edge aggregator[1] I still see it as the model for how a crucial part of the distributed live web will evolve. So why abandon that idea? Sure it will be a few years before it goes mainstream and Crunchboard can milk its niche market for a while but centralized jobsites have no long term future [2].

Now if Arrington wasn't clued into the Live Web I might understand but he continually demonstrates how in tune he with the importance of RSS. And of course, as Dave Winer says, the feed is the advertisement. Look at what Matt Terenzio is doing to generate a River of Jobs. That's a step in the right direction and ultimately everything will move entirely to the edges. Every company will blog their own vacancies and filter them into ad-hoc feeds, a la del.icio.us, by tagging them with relevant keywords. There will be a role for Edgeio-like aggregators to play in recombining and sanitizing those feeds, but the idea of paying a centralized job board a fee of $200 will ultimately become a nonsense.

[1] Both Keith Teare and Pete Cashmore made good points in arguing why they believe Edgeio is a true edge aggregator. I'm an advisor to Grazr Corp, another kind of edge aggregator, but Keith and myself had that debate long before I joined the team. I joined them because I'm a true believer in edge aggregation and that it can replace alot of centralization.

[2] Mike's one heck of a smart guy and I'm a big fan of his web publications but I just don't get where he's going with this long term, though it can of course be a cash cow in the short term.

Comments

[Paul Watson]

Just on the fee aspect; Isn't the point of $200 on CrunchBoard to only let in the serious and interesting jobs. That way job seekers won't have to wade through too many burger flipper jobs. I am also not sure how tags and edge gathering will help me find cool jobs without me maintaining a list of cool companies?

[James Corbett]

Conor O'Neill posted on this issue back in Janauary -

http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/2006/01/matching_startu.html

He felt he'd wasted €200 in advertising with Monster.ie and not done much better in spending €800 with the Irish Examiner. As he said - "This may be a reflection of almost total employment of people in our technical area in Cork but we were deeply disappointed with the response. We could not afford to be doing this on a regular basis..."

Yet the position Conor was advertising would surely qualify as an 'serious and interesting' one. As would many others from startups who can't afford that kind of fee.

He also commented positively at the time on the idea of tagging positions for aggregation -

http://www.argolon.com/2006/02/04/disintermediation-of-job-sites/

He did however warn that there would be an issue in building momentum and I agree Paul that this isn't going to happen today or tomorrow but I do believe we'll see this kind of thing taking off within the next year or two.

And the rapid take up on microformats (eg. by the likes of Yahoo!) is going to accelerate progress.