US Monster Employment Index from 2007 to 2008

Now we have the complete US Monster Employment Index from January 2007 to December 2008.



When I started to monitor this index, I wanted to see whether it can serve as a leading economic index like other indices for wanted ads. From the chart, it looks like a concurrent index than a leading one. As those data are not seasonally adjusted, it is not yet the time to make the call.

The blip around April to June 2008 was explained by Monster that the time from April to June is usually a busy-hiring season. We will see this April whether the same seasonal phenomenon will repeat itself.

US in recession since December 2007

US National Bureau of Economic Research announced that US has been in recession since December 2007.

NBER noted that the previous peak occurred in November 2007. Comments from the press dismissed it as an obvious hindsight, though I don't recall the same pessimism during the same period of last year (blogs in 2007/11, 2008/01, and 2008/05). The beginning of a recession is not so evident as it just comes down from the peak. The level of economic activities are still as vibrant as the peak. By the same token, people would not notice the start of a recovery when the economy is not far away from the trough. The academic definition is arguably differnt from the common wisdom. The NBER identifies the turn of events, from peak to trough or from trough to peak. We, the non-researchers, recognize the top half and the bottom half of the waves.

Real GDP growth of the past four quarters

• 2007 4th quarter : -0.2%
• 2008 1st quarter : +0.9%
• 2008 2nd quarter : +2.8%
• 2008 3rd quarter : -0.5% (est.)

One interesting thing to note is that the GDP number actually increased in the first half of 2008 (in real GDP growth, numbers from US Bureau of Economic Analysis). As NBER changed its definition of recession from the old "measure of a period of negative, real GDP growth", the statistics from past recessions may not be a perfect indicator. Nevertheless, in the twentieth century there were four recessions lasted longer than 23 months, and one of the four lasted 43 months. As we have been in a recession for 12 months now, let's hope we will see the recovery soon in 2009.

Javascript and DOM by Douglas Crockford

I came across these videos when I was studying SproutCore.

If you are in the software line of work, this may be of interest to you. Otherwise, this is dry. Mr. Crockford certainly has his opinion regarding things. The talk on the following subjects is nevertheless worth your time, or at least mine.

The JavaScript Programming Language (4 parts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2ifWcnQs6M

Theory of the DOM (3 parts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Y0U-2qJMs

Advanced JavaScript (3 parts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwYPG6vreJg

Android Phone Delay

The rumor had it that the Android phone could face delays, http://www.cellular-news.com/story/31963.php.

But wait! Google immediately re-confirmed that the Android phone will be on schedule for release by the end of 2008. With T-Mobile US preparing for the launch of its first Android phone, everything seems to be on track. Then why was the rumor in the first place.

Not sure! It can be just a small marketing PR skirmish. It may be a good idea to remind people of Android amid the iPhone hype. I wrote two blogs on Android late last year and earlier this year. All indications pointed to the year end of 2008 as the earliest time frame for Android phones to join the market. In a way and in my opinion, Google has the easier part of creating an Android phone. Linux is part of Google's culture and it is not the first time for the Android team to put Java on top of an operating system. The manufacturers are taking the hard part in providing the Board Support Package (BSP) which links Android software to the underlying hardware. After all, cell phone hardware is far from being standardized as that in the PC industry.

Base on the track records of HTC and Samsung, it is a tight schedule for anything to show up for this Christmas. Nevertheless this rumor validated the marketing success of Android as press and consumers believed the "2nd half of 2008" to be July not December.

GYM search

GYM search is the nick name some Internet pundits give to the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

By any measure, Google owns at least 60% of the search traffic on the Internet as of today. It is more than double the combination of Yahoo and MSN's search traffic. I wonder why Microsoft would like to buy Yahoo in the first place. Since Microsoft and Yahoo walked away from the merger talk, there are investors want to force the marriage. The saga has not ended yet.

Yahoo and Microsoft has pledged to improve their search engine before. If you look closer to the press release, the emphasis was mostly on the ad platform. It seemed Yahoo and Microsoft's executives believed their search engines were only inferior in that aspect. People go to search sites for many different things. Maybe searching for a product or a service is the most common drive. But people also use the search engine to conduct many other activities, like doing homework, expanding knowledge, or simply to kill time. It is quite natural for a person to stick with a search engine which fulfills most of his or her search needs, for shopping or something else. If Yahoo and Microsoft's managers still look at the top use case only, they missed the long tail. It is the long tail that wags the dog.

I recommend everyone to see this video from the Google IO conference session: Underneath the Covers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions (video). If Google did it, it is a proof by itself that can be done. If Microsoft is willing to spend more than 44 billion dollars to buy Yahoo, Microsoft can build a truly competitive search engine by one tenth of that cost. The search engine is the toll booth to the Internet. It is possible and it is imperative for Yahoo, Microsoft, or whoever competes with Google to have a state-of-the-art search engine. It is the same rationale that Apple never gives up its own operating system.