Freelance Jobs Made Easy With iGoogle

freelance-folderFreelance Folder has an excellent post about simplifying your freelance job search using iGoogle to aggregate your favorite freelance job sources. Using iGoogle makes the entire process quick and easy.

Which begs the question–what does this do to freelance sites that depend heavily on pulling freelance job information from other sources (like we do for our own Freelance-Zone.com job posts)?

It seems to make our freelance jobs posting–and other sites more dedicated to freelance jobs–totally irrelevant in terms of offering a useful service. iGoogle has this angle completely covered for those who invest the time to actually set it up and check the feeds. So what’s a freelance site to do?

The answer isn’t clear-I know more than one person in the (part time) business of mentoring writers and there’s a common complaint that the people they want to help don’t actually bother to take sound advice. I think it’s true that people will pay to be told what they want to hear. Unfortunately for my writing pals, telling people what they want to hear isn’t on the menu; helping someone be a successful writer is. Telling someone they have a MAJOR advantage in the job hunt by using iGoogle may be the right thing to do, but it doesn’t insure people will actually flock to the app to give themselves a competitive edge.

So in the end there is likely still a market for freelance jobs and freelance job sites…and that’s why I’ll continue to post the jobs here. But not all the people who read job posts on places like FZ are lazy–some of them are a lot like me, finding RSS feeds a bit annoying for no particular good reason. Call me a curmudgeon. All in all, the future of the freelance writing-themed blog is safe and sound, with or without iGoogle. But it IS a hell of an app.