I always wondered why Seth Godin did not accept comments on his blog. But, I finally turned off comments on my own blog (not because I'm popular like Seth). Sure, every once in a while there is a gem that makes you smile. But, really folks,  those gems are just floating in a sea of garbage. That is today's Internet for you.

I've talked a lot about the growth of competition. What I left out, is that a lot of your competition is trash. Search engine algorithms can't decipher quality and so we're stuck with much worse than the common denominator for a while (forever?).

'Next' is a fun science fiction movie about a guy who can see just two minutes into the future. But it reminded me of the importance of looking five years into the future. Because seeing the future, changes it. As Abraham Lincoln said "The best way to predict your future is to create it."

Here's what I see coming in the job search business:

A big thanks to the Google team for cleaning house. Do a Google search for jobs, and you will see a remarkable difference compared with results from two years ago. This helps everyone doing honest work in the job search business!

An HR blogger said something interesting in a recent job boards-are-dying type post: "We will be job board free in 2 years." In a follow-up post to explain how this would occur, this anonymous blogger says (problem areas in red):

"When you need something, you go to Google, so why not use it to find a job?  Simply enter your criteria, say sales jobs Chicago, and what you’ll get is a myriad of jobs.  Some will be on the boards (they pay an inordinate amount of dough to get their results listed high on Google), some will be on aggregators, some will be on free sites, and some will be from company sites. The point is, they are all in one place!  No longer do you have to search Monster, and then Hotjobs, and then craigslist.  They are all indexed in one convenient place, your Google search results.

If you could afford a domain name for your job board that contained a single dictionary word, your category keyword or some related keyword, would you do it? These folks did:

• care.com
• caterer.com
• climber.com
• experience.com
• idealist.org

Judging by compete.com traffic graphs, it's a relatively high flying group...

Know of any others?

In the past few days I've been remaking InternetRecruiting.us with a new purpose and a new domain at OnlineRecruitingNews.com.

This new site will be a cooperative of 25 dues paying job boards who want to increase their visibility. Whether or not you become one of our managing members, you will still be welcome to maintain your profile and post news there.

It will not be exclusive by category, so it's possible we will have two competing websites as members. I would prefer not to have competitors but this will be run more or less first-come, first-served.

There is something about diversity that makes LatPro as a business track the economy almost perfectly - much better than most other job boards. We started feeling the effects of the recession not when it was announced but rather the moment it actually began and perhaps a full year before other job boards started suffering -- not just this time but in the previous recession as well.

I would like to add a little bit to the discussion about the future of job boards. As a longtime job board operator, I alternate between being amused by job board bashing and being concerned over the future of our own business.  In addition to running a job board, we also have been in the job search engine business for two+ years and run a number of career focused social networks.

In 1997 when I launched my first job board, you could put a handful of jobs online, call yourself a job board and attract attention. A lot of things were easier back then - Goto.com traffic cost just pennies and eventually when Google AdWords surfaced, it was dirt cheap also. No longer.

As monster.com and careerbuilder.com grew,  important things began to change. The price of cost per click advertising rose quickly and the shine came off a niche job board if it did not overwhelmingly dominate its category.