So this past year I’ve done so much talking about the benefits of the advancements of the social web that I realized I started to do more talking than doing. I’ve given talks to co-workers, participated in conferences, been a personal champion of the social (as Microsoft’s Zune people once liked to refer to it) to extend the usefulness of the web. Then I read this article by Google’s Mihai Parparita about the often overlooked and underused feeds being offered by various websites. In particular this passage hit home, a reader comments about he used Google reader and RSS feeds to enhance his job hunt.

I was having a hard time finding the right job here in Houston. Days would go by without talking to a single recruiter. But then I started using Google Reader to subscribe to custom-made job search feeds for Craigslist, and for oodle.com (which already aggregates feeds from thousands of other classified ad websites).

It’s an option that had never even crossed my mind and it gave me some great ideas. For instance, using a combination of various RSS feeds, Yahoo Pipes, and Tumblr to create a personalized job bulletin that I could then subscribe to in GoogleReader or Bloglines!

After I thought of the idea, as I suspected, a number of people had already created applications in Yahoo Pipes that effectively did this, so I just found the ones that most closely matched my needs to modify and began creating my own personally tailored job board. My first step was to clone a few Yahoo Pipes that were already programmed to do just a thing.

Why do I clone them you ask? Because I don’t want to log-in one day to make changes only to find out the person who made my favorite pipe has deleted them. If you’ve never used yahoo pipes, it’s a service that allows you to visually, quickly and easily program complicated web apps that are ‘mash-ups’ of different types of information.

Pipes was created by Yahoo to serve the growing trend of web users and developers who often sought more personally tailored information or entertainment. With Pipes, Yahoo lets just about anyone who isn’t a programmers or coders tinker with pretty complicated things within a visual context that makes it easier to get results.

In my case it allowed me to modify someone else’s job search feeds to cater to my needs. You simply type in your search terms, any items you’d like to exclude and your location an this pipe scans RSS feeds from Simply Hired, Indeed, Monster.com and Hotjobs….filtering out anything not relevant to your search. See the resulting pipe here.

The Pipe’s results can also be viewed as RSS feeds which I then separate by location and job. I then created a ‘union’ of my tailored feeds in Pipes and added the resulting mash-up feeds of my job search into Google Reader. Now every day I can check one place for only jobs relevant to my needs, interests and skill set.

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