This is going to be HIRED and other widget updates

Man, does this pain me to do, but I just put up a Simply Hired powered "Job-a-matic" job board called "This is going to be HIRED."   Obviously, having worked for Union Square Ventures during the time of the Indeed funding, I was pretty conflicted about this.

I've wanted useful job tools on this blog for a while, but something more substantial than a sidebar widget.  With this Job-a-matic job board, I can have a whole board at my domain where I can even sell my own jobs automatically.  That's right, for $5 a week, you can have a prominently placed job on my job board.

Is it a good value?

Nope.

In fact, I'd be surprised if this job board gets any traffic whatsoever.   In fact, Oddcast's personal experience with blogger boards has been relatively poor.  Very few hits when we post to major tech blogger boards.   

It's interesting, because, in my opinion, Simply Hired has done a better job in knocking down big names for job distribution...  MySpace, Typepad, Feedburner...    but yet they lag behind in traffic to Indeed.  Why?

I think it's because of the location and implementation.  I just don't think your favorite tech blog or social network is necessarily where you go to look for jobs.  You go to the best and most comprehensive job search sites, and that, to me, is what Indeed has become. 

And, even if you did get jobs from these random places, it needs to be prominently placed.  While its neat to have a job board on my site, and I'll likely leave it there, I just don't see most of my traffic, which is RSS based, ever thinking to visit it.  What I need is a better way to put what I think are interesting opportunities for my audience right in my posts.  That's something I would integrate immediately, no matter who the provider.

As for the Job-a-matic... it was great because it was so easy, but not so great because it doesn't quite work like a distributed version of Simply Hired.  I couldn't autosave a job search, b/c it isn't really their job search tool.  It's just a list.  I'm not sure why they did this, but that really takes down the usefulness of the tool.  Also, while NYC-only was available as a filter for users, it wasn't the default, which, for this blog, it should be.

Anyhoo, that's not the only widget update I made.  Last.fm just came out with some cool new flash ones that allow you to play snippets of the songs I listen to, and my personal radio station.  I also added a Meetup.com widget for the NY Tech Meetups.

Gone is the co.comment widget.  Co.comment was a fantastic idea, tracking my comments across the web and helping me pull them back, but they never really figured out a great way to make this useful to me or my audience. 

Any other suggestions on helping me satisfy my widget cravings?