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Eventually, there will be a number of sites that try to consolidate job listings and responses from the Web as a whole. This morning, we were wondering what is required. Probably, we thought, a combination of a search agent and a series of standard "markup tags".

In other, non-employment areas, the move to standardize product and service accessibility is taking shape as industry wide "HTML Extensions". In other words, much of an industry has to agree to use a standard set of industry-specific tagging schemes.

Identify has developed a complex and interesting scheme for standardizing product information in Web Pages. A similar, search engine oriented, approach would make a solid contribution to the overall effectiveness of the Electronic Employment industry.

Take a look at Informant (your personal search agent on the Internet). The service is a product of the Dartmouth labs and performs some functions similar to URL Minder. The Informant allows you to input 3 sets of keywords that you like to search for, and 5 favorite URLs. Then, the service checks, at an interval that you specify, and notifies you of changes by email. It's available for licensing and makes a great addition to site features. You can also use it to stay abreast of your competitors.

For one eason or another, we're in the Washington, DC area for a couple of weeks. The other evening during rush hour, we were sitting in the mess that is a daily grind for most local residents. The commercial came on the car radio and went something like:

Instead of sitting in traffic this evening, Gail stayed in the office to look for a new job on the web using CareerMeister at www.careermeister.com.

Nice way to reach the part time web users....very nice.

We've added a fairly heavy travel schedule to our summer plans so the "daily" might get a bit more erratic. Rest assured that we'll keep the material coming.

We very highly reccommend theJavascript Tip of the Week page. If you're going to move forward from this point, your site will have to be increasingly user friendly. The current tip describes the Javascript required to tell which browser a visitor is using and then tailor the content accordingly. Bookmark it.

Our break was severely interrupted by an attack of the Microsoft Word Document Virus. Assuming that you use Microsoft Word, download and install the virus protection patch (IBM or Mac). The tool lets you scan your hard drive for the virus but works so slowly that we eventually turned it off. The IBM machines in our office were easily protected with Mcafee (a shareware version is a part of Shareware.com's IBM Survival Kit). The Mac machines have been more problematic. We have found no decent anti-viral protection that watches incoming Mac Files for the Word Virus. The Microsoft provided scanner read about 300 documents in 90 minutes. To scan our drives completely would have taken days. And, the Microsoft tools are dated in early May. We're reasonably sure that some of the variations of the virus we experienced were brand new and not covered by the Microsoft tools. Sheesh.

The reason for all of this description? We caught the virus through email attachments. Essentially, the virus is a macro that saves a copy of the document's text in an invisible form. So your documents double in size when you save them. We noticed it as a 3 page word document that was over 2.5 Megabytes. It destroyed our email accounts and the accounts of some of our clients and partners (Eudora accounts sort of choke on large attachments). Needless to say, our clients and partners all had the great pleasure of learning about viral protection at the expense of work. It'd be fairly easy to let the virus grow a number of your files and rob you of all your hard disk space. Yuck.