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Career Magazine appears to be optimizing their budgets on market development. With a booth at the Current COMDEX and an expanding client list, it looks like a smart short-term strategy. The site itself is beginning to suffer the signs of age that plague the web's hypercompetitive environment. Essenared to invest in a site face lift every 3 to six months.

But, the good news is that Career Magazine's recruiter programs seem to be taking off. Competitively priced, they offer a solid alternative to the more popular Recruiter's Online Network

Essentially, you buy a listing in the Executive Recruiter's Directory which entitles you to post job listings at about $30/per listing. Like the Recruiter's Online Network, its a great place to get your feet wet.

As you know, we think the best way to compete on the web is by embracing the competition. Austin Knight, well known for their non-electronic recruitment advertising and employee communications services, has put together a stellar resource for Electronic Recruiters. We salute their efforts and urge you to visit their website.

Among the features:

• An Electronic Recruitment Survey available in exchange for a bit of information about you and your firm.

• A short tutorial on "cyber-recruiting".

• A "Recruiter's Resource" that includes a twice monthly layoff report and listings of national career fairs.

All things considered, the Austin Knight website is an impressive display of competence and awareness of the needs of recruiters. Bravo!

Just exactly how spiders actually change the Electronic Recruiting Marketplace remains to be seen. In response to a number of queries, we're providing access to more information about spiders and spider technology.

• The Robot Mailing List....includes archives and an ongoing discussion.

• WWW Robot Frequently Asked Questions...great place to start learning about robots and spiders

• A list of known robots....pretty comprehensive but can't list proprietary development.

• A standard for Robot exclusion.....how to prevent well mannered robots from indexing your site.

• Guidelines for Robot Writers

• Ethical Web Agents

• robots can be ruthless.....what to do when a robot is overwheming your server.

• Technical robot mailing list

Put this in the "Betting on the Obvious" category. Spider technology is rapidly moving to the Electronic Employment marketplace. As the competition intensifies for site consolidation, a new employment paradigm is rapidly emerging.

Spiders (or web crawlers) search the net for specific types of information and return an indexed database of results. It's the same principle that allows AltaVista and HotBot to provide searchable indices of the Web as a whole. Reasonably inexpensive to develop, spider technology allows the consolidation of all information in a certain arena to be compiled automatically. Top Jobs is a spider based employment site. Their basic financial model appears to be a combination of subscription, advertising and listing highlights. That is, besides the obvious subscription and advertising revenue, it appears that they will allow a client to buy the equivalent of keywords for a fee.

Top Jobs should win some sort of award for being first to market. They very definitely won't be the last. Though their approach violates our basic cannon of "don't release a website before it's done", we have to applaud their market entry.

With over 40,000 jobs in their database, gathered from the web, Top Jobs showcases a terribly difficult problem. Gathering the dat is one thing, making it usable and accessible is a completely different story. As the number of employment spiders explodes, the strategic key will be, as it always is, in interface design.

We imagine that another six months of web development will bring increasing sophistication to the spider game. There are techniques for getting your content indexed more quickly or asking that the spider ignore your material. Complex, on the fly databases are somewhat problematic. Upstream service providers can be difficult. Web response times can effect performance.