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In time for the one-year anniversary of the destructive Haiti earthquake, a group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MediaLab have rolled out Konbit, an expansive work database for those effected by the devastation, usable by those with computers and without, by those literate and illiterate. Aaron Zinman, a grad student who, along with Greg Elliott, developed the site, explained the opportunity.

"Normally (non-governmental organizations) organizations import foreign labor into Haiti due to the difficulty of finding local talent -- a problem we are trying to combat."

There's a lot of talk about the ways in which cloud computing will impact the IT job market - changing demands for the numbers and the skills of employees.

As James Urquhart notes in an article in CNET today, there have been a number of interesting signs lately pointing to the health of the cloud-related job market: 181 jobs advertised at Amazon Web Services last week, for example, and 175 at Rackspace.

An Indian company, Unity Infraprojects, is using RFID tags from Mumbai-based Essen to keep track of so-called "ghost workers."

UI is working to replace two pipelines leading from Lake Tansa to Mumbai. This is an important water source for this immense city. In order to make the project happen, Unity must employ a very large number of contract employees. If any significant number of these employees fail to show, it could effect the timeline and that could result in steep fines for the company; not to mention Unity will have to pay the employment companies providing the workers unless they can prove they were absent.

A large majority of companies are moving away from job boards and toward social media as their primary recruiting tool, according to annual survey results released by social recruitment software company Jobvite.

The report, entitled Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey 2010, was based on an online survey taken by 600 participants between May and June.

SimplyHired.com, a job search site that aggregates job board postings and makes them searchable via one interface, is launching a new feature: Facebook integration. With the added opt-in functionality, you can see if any of your Facebook friends work at a particular company and you can pull a list of all the companies where your friends are employed.

And no, the headline is not as misleading as you think - engineers from Facebook actually helped SimplyHired build this feature in the hopes that it will showcase the power of the social network's new Open Graph platform and the usefulness it can provide when properly implemented.

There's been a lot of anxiety provoked (and money made) predicting a "parade of terribles" in the workplace as a result of social networking sites and employee blogs. While there is no doubt that these sites provide additional opportunities for employees to be distracted from getting their work done, I contend that not all that much has changed.

Employees that are wasting their time on social networking sites today were gossiping at the water cooler in yesteryear, and the solution is the same: thoughtful policy implementation and vigilant managerial oversight.

Throughout the economic downtown of the last few years, which is only now slowly beginning to turn around, there have been few industries that continued to create jobs and support the economy. We've mentioned before (as many others have) how the government should be doing its best to foster more entrepreneurship, one of the few areas continuing to create jobs, and Wednesday the National Venture Capital Association and StartUpHire.com job board released data supporting these suggestions.

Viadeo, the social network for business, has added five applications built on Google's OpenSocial platform. These apps are Twitter, YouTube, PollDaddy, a doc sharer called Ayos iShare and Google Presentation.

iShare will allow users to upload any file up to 100 MB and post it for download on their account. The Twitter app will allow a user to post their Tweet automatically on their Viadeo page. The Google Presentation function will allow them to convert Powerpoint presentations to Google and share them.

Looking for a job? You're probably about to find one. By the year 2018 there will be 1.4 million job openings for so-called "computer specialists" - that's everyone from developers to database administrators - according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Sears Holdings Corp. just announced they posted thousands of jobs on Twitter via the Twitter-based job board service, TweetMyJOBS.com. The parent company of retail stores like Sears and Kmart and home to brands like Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Lands' End, Jaclyn Smith, Joe Boxer, Apostrophe and Covington, Sears Holdings posted over 500,000 job openings last year via traditional recruiting channels like job search sites and newspapers. Now those same jobs will be on Twitter, too. Says Lance Brolin, Director, Talent & Human Capital Services Operations for Sears Holdings, of the decision to engage on Twitter, "we're quickly realizing that we needed to broaden our employment marketing to include social media."