Congrats to the fine folks over at SimplyHired with what appears to be a successful launch of their new product. Basically, it's a set of tools to allow blogs to create their own job board. Those postings then get factored into the SimplyHired search results (right?). Revenue gets split 50/50.

I'm not exactly sure what the benefit of ditching your already existing job board would be, but then again, I haven't played with the product yet. Getting factored into the search results would probably bring a windfall of traffic to a small niche site. If you're looking for exposure, the 50% split is probably worth it.

Mike Arrington mentions that each job board will be its own separate bucket of information. He chimes in with his personal thoughts on this near the end of the TechCrunch post:

Instead, I'd like to see a single job board for tech bloggers, one that we can all sell into, and share the revenues pro-rata. There's no reason why TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Guy Kawasaki and the others should all have their data in separate silos, aggregated only at the SimplyHired or Edgeio level along with other less interesting listings from all over the planet. None of these announced products do this.

And he's right. The thing is, I know of 3 companies (at least 1 of them funded) working on the exact same thing as SimplyHired's Job-a-Matic. There is also JobThread, JobCoin, JobTarget, and I think even Jobvertise offers something similar. They all lack the SimplyHired branding and the cool kids in the web2.0 circles aren't necessarily using them -- but they also all take way less than 50%.

As Jason Calacanis might say, the web is a hit driven market. If either Edgeio or SimplyHired moves in this direction with any success, expect a dozen other "me too" products. They'll all claim to be the bestest place in the world for you to store your data, and chances are there will be little sharing. There's the potential for all this to create further fragmentation and a world of mess when trying to distinguish what blog uses what product.

Hmm... if only there were a single place on the internet to store your resume that supports both hResume and HR-XML... ;)

Ryan Carson over at DropSend has been chronicling his attempts to sell his company. I admire his transparency, as an entrepreneur it's fun to read along at home. His name dropping accounts of failed acquisitions though may be breaking some sort of unspoken rule.

A commenter on TechCrunch mentioned how it should be fair game, since most companies are just interested in getting details on competition rather than making a serious acquisition offer. The cynic in me would like to agree, but I still think it may be best to turn the other cheek.

We've had both at Emurse, the serious and the not so serious. Hell, we've had a company bring in a team of engineers with notebooks to hear us describe how we do certain things. I guess we just figured if they're going to rip us off, they'll do it no matter what. You just have to be smarter and faster in the places where you can. If you're innovating and people are copying, we figure that means we're in the drivers seat.

But are faux pas and failed deals worth burning bridges with inappropriate name dropping? At least in our case, absolutely not. Everyone we've talked to has led to interesting and beneficial relationships. Even visiting the company with the note taking engineers, we found a cultural environment we could relate to and a host of intelligent thinkers.

As an entrepreneur, I'm grateful for Carson's posts. Then again, I'm not someone looking to talk to him about a possible acquisition. Actually... maybe we should... I wonder how much traffic his blog gets ;)