Tracking the IT Job Market with a Bot

atlantageek writes "Is the IT job market improving? Is the growth in Unix or Windows? Should I study Data Warehousing or E-Commerce? Identify the recent trends with CJ Miner, a small tool I've written that has been monitoring the Computer Jobs website for the last year."

Comments

Man, I miss Echo

[jkeegan]

I worked at CMGi for five years, and a good portion of that was working for a daughter company named InfoMation on a project called Echo. It was a web scraping tool that let you create your own personal newspaper, from any source you wanted (web, usenet, mail, rss feeds, etc). Imagine google alerts but you could create custom news feeds to any sites you want.. Have it look each day for new albums from your favorite bands by creating custom searches on music sites.. Have it monitor your competition's website for changes (or look for press releases regarding your competition on the wirefeed services). Track articles in industry trends you want to follow.

I really liked our alert system (ahem), which would put the titles of articles in the subject line, unlike google alerts, which just puts the category.. You could also subscibe via daily summaries which only sent one email per day, or via cellphone/pager sms messages.

I miss it. Unfortunately our sales department tried selling it to the insurance industry, which takes way too long to purchase technology (as opposed to, oh, say, a stock broker, who would want to follow every stock he's got his clients invested in.. go figure).