We recently re-casted the Jobs category under Quick ZapTasks on the right side of main console. Our list of feeds, whilst somewhat arbitrary did have some method to the madness. They present a list of feeds from the leading technology/Web 2.0/New Media blogs that have started offering job boards with RSS feeds.

Update: We just added the LifeHacker Job Board Feed to this list as well. The ZapTask link below also has been updated.

For those that are wondering what the utility is of a specialty job board, here’s a good post I came across, written by Paul Stamatiou.

Here’s the (updated) list:

• 37 Signals
• Crunchboard (TechCrunch)
• Guy Kawasaki Job Site
• Joel On Software
• PaidContent
• ProBlogger
• Read/WriteWeb
• Slashdot
• TechGigger
• VentureBeat
• LifeHacker

Here’s what a sample ZapTXT alert looks like for a Flash designer posting on LifeHacker:

Unfortunately, some job boards offered by a few of the well-known blogs do not have well formed feeds but we have many of the good ones here.

To get started

• On ZapTXT.com, go to the Jobs section under Quick ZapTasks,
  check off the job boards that you want to monitor, filter listings if
  you like (e.g. Designer, Marketing, etc), and pick your delivery
  preferences. Thats it. Move on with your life, we’ll alert when we
  find a match.

OR

• Or if you want to monitor the whole list above, use this shared ZapTask for Jobs that has all of the feeds bundled up as one. For those of you so inclined, you can even export this as OPML if you like, to take it to your reader after you set it up. Just click on the Export link on your MyZapTasks page.

Drop us a line in the comments section below if you think we omitted any good ones.

Happy Zapping, Sameer

technorati tags:Jobs, ZapTXT, JobBoards, Job+Boards, Specialty+JobBoards, RSS+Jobs, RSS

Most of our users are really looking to get the right information they need from a set of trusted webpages, delivered to them in the most convenient way (email, IM, SMS, RSS).

Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch recently wrote a nice post on the new release from Grazr and his analysis, as well as some of the comments to the post prompted me to write a few notes on OPML and how it powers ZapTXT.

We do different stuff here at ZapTXT, the only connection being that we also strive to make access to RSS and OPML easier for the user. Grazr is a very cool application that pushes the limits of how RSS is used today and given that RSS is the backbone of ZapTXT we can’t help but be thrilled when someone else does something cool to push this technology into the spotlight. Grazr is still in its infancy in terms of promise and main stream usability but its charging at full speed in the right direction.

At ZapTXT we try very hard to bring the benefits of new technologies to our user community but shield our users from the technical mumbo jumbo. One of the technologies that we have a lot of faith in is OPML. Props to Dave Winer for conceiving of this technology and its many uses. In our case the ability of OPML to bring a set of RSS feeds in one file is the most common use.

So how did we accomplish this objective of leveraging useful technology without requiring you to have the technical know-how?

You many not know this but as a ZapTXT user, you are already using OPML. When you combine multiple feeds to search against, you have created an OPML file! Yay. It’s really that simple within ZapTXT. Once you set up a ZapTask with multiple feeds (your OPML file), you can edit this OPML file by a) adding or removing sites (yes, I say ’sites’ because we do the auto discovery for you - you enter a URL for a web page and we go and fetch the RSS feed for you), b) change your keywords or c) your delivery preferences to make this OPML file as pointed and relevant to your task monitoring needs.

For those that are aware of OPML, you can bring an OPML URL to ZapTXT by clicking on Advanced when you are logged in. We suck in the OPML file and let you monitor the entire feed set against keywords and alert you in real time when there’s a match. Say you spend a lot of time refining you feeds within the OPML file via ZapTXT and have other uses for it outside of ZapTXT (maybe you want to use it with Grazr!). No problem. It’s very easy to export. In fact if you use the RSS reader within Mozilla or Flock, just drag the file name to your RSS list and you’re done.

So congratulations to the rest of you ZapTXT users that prefer that the technology adapts to your needs, seamlessly and in the background, instead of the other way around. You can proudly say that you’ve been using OPML as well.

Happy Zapping, Sameer