First, though, you need to get a startup job. Here are 10 sites (in no particular order) that I found helpful in my startup job search:

1. Doostang – Doostang may be the exclusive career community for top young professionals (whatever that means), but it’s also a great place to find startup jobs. A lot of startups are created by ex-young professionals, ergo, ex-young professionals are already on registered with the exclusive career community for top young professionals. They want you to join them in their “ex” status.

2. LinkedIn – For those of you that live by the “getting a job is all about who you know” mantra, well, you probably don’t work at a startup. With LinkedIn, “who you know” certainly helps you get started, and that’s sort of comforting.

3. Startuply – Startuply is quickly becoming the it place for listing startup jobs. A lot of the blog job boards further down in this list have 100-200 job postings, not even necessarily all for startups. Startuply currently has just under 1,000 startup jobs listed. They provide background information on the companies, and it sounds like they’re just getting started with their feature set. I have nothing but great things to say for their outreach efforts too. They quickly responded to a bug post I reported, and I was happy to send over a screenshot to help them out.

4. craigslist – This came as a surprise to me too, but craigslist turned out to be a halfway decent option for my startup job search. Startups are pretty tight with their cash, and craigslist has a price and distribution that can’t be beat. There are just two things you need to keep in mind with craigslist. One, there will be hundreds of resumes submitted for every job. Two, because there are hundreds of resumes submitted for every job (including the one you’re applying to), pick only those jobs that fit you perfectly.

5. Crunchboard – TechCrunch’s job board is one of the best places to find startup jobs because TechCrunch is where you go to find startup news. Makes sense, no? (Also, kudos to TechCrunch on the redesign. It’s about time.)

6. 37signals Job Board – 37signals job board is another blog with a great job board, especially if you’re a developer or designer.

7. Silicon Alley Insider Job Board – SAI’s job board is obviously a great place for New York startup jobs, especially with the startup boom in New York. What’s less obvious is that there are a few west coast jobs sprinkled in. You might get lucky with one of these.

8. Authentic Jobs – I’m not sure how I found Authentic Jobs, but I know that I found some of the most interesting opportunities on this site. There’s a mix of freelance jobs you can scope out too.

9. Company Websites – The great thing about applying for startup jobs is that you’re often applying to companies you’ve heard that have websites you’ve actually used. When you read about a new company on TechCrunch, go check out their website to see if they’re hiring. (Hint: They usually are.)

10. Get out, ask questions, meet people, make friends – (OK, I lied, 9 websites and a dose of the real world). You need to do a whole lot more to get a startup job than merely visiting job board sites. This list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that. I was able to meet a few people during my search and most people were more than happy to send my resume along. People understand what it’s like looking for a job, and if they work with startups they certainly want to see them succeed. Everyone likes playing matchmaker.

(Also, worth checking out even though they helped only minimally in my search were Joel on Software’s Job Board and the Crayola Crayon-looking StartUpers site.)

Update (9/14/08): When I made this list, I focused on the startup job sites that were most helpful for me. It wasn’t a list of all the startup job sites out there. If I had done a bit more research, I would have noticed Sean Aune’s post with 18 Startup Job Sites (damn, 18 is more than 10) to help bolster this list. A lot of these are general sites, but there are a few in here worth mentioning that have some potential:

• CoNotes – I’d never seen this one, but it looks promising. If anyone’s used it, let me know what you think.
• GoBigNetwork – I’m not convinced this is a the best place to find a startup job. It seemed like a better place to find a startup partner or investor. The quality of job postings isn’t as good as some of the other sites in this list eiter.
• Mashable Jobs – The same logic works here as with the TechCrunch job board. It wasn’t as helpful for me, but it likely would be for others.
• nPost - nPost is more strictly technical though there are a few non-technical jobs in here. I used nPost to some success, but it’s more like a Joel On Software job board for startups.
• Venture Loop – Venture Loop lists companies backed by VC firms and so fills a need I mentioned in #10 of my original list. People like playing matchmaker in this industry, especially when they have an interest in that match’s success.

After my first iPhone App Store review, I realized I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t dug nearly deep enough to really comment on the App Store. I had only begun to try out many of the applications, and as I admitted, I’d really stayed away from paid applications.

So let’s do this again, shall we? I even paid for an application or two this time. (Imagine that, people paying for software.)

5 More of My Favorite Apps

1. Jambd – I am the last person in the world that would ever use this celebrity and gossip new application, but that doesn’t mean it’s not great. Jambd just works and works well. No crashes (Nytimes take note), fast load times, and a great way to browse a stack of related pictures make this application a joy to use.

2. Crash Bandicoot Racing – If you’ve ever played any of Nintendo’s Mario Cart racing titles, you’ll know what this game is. You drive around by rotating your iPhone like a steering wheel and fire missiles and bombs at your racing opponents with a few taps on the screen. This game has great gameplay and Nintendo GameCube-level graphics. It’s well worth the $9.99 and has probably sucked up way more of my time than I would like to admit.

3. Pocketpedia – This serves a direct need of mine that I’ve been supporting with various emails and notes on my iPhone. Pocketpedia allows you to search Amazon and build lists of items you want. This is exactly the solution I was hoping for while browsing Strand Bookstore during many of my lunch breaks this past year.

4. AOL Radio - Boston probably has one of the country’s best set of rock stations. With AOL Radio I can listen to at least 2 of my favorite stations no matter where I am. If only it had all radio stations, it might be a killer application.

5. Sportstap - Sportstap is one of the few applications that subtly uses mobile ads. It’s also the only sports application that is covering the Olympics as far as I can tell. That differentiation has helped make my primary sports application selection a lot easier.

5 More Apps with Potential

1. pTerm – This is a great application for running SSH on-the-go. All you command line junkies take note.

2. Glucose Charter - If you’ve ever seen a friend prick their finger to get a blood sample to measure their blood sugar, you have to think applications like this have potential. Hopefully with better access to information and nutritional tracking, this will save a finger or two.

3. Education Applications like Molecules and 3D Earth – Both of these applications bring education a step closer to the 3D world. Imagine if kids learned organic chemistry from 3D models all the time. They’d spend less of their time trying to draw sticks and lines to simulate 3D and more time visualizing 3D structures from the beginning.

4. Bible – You can search the Bible from you pocket. My high school would have practically required this thing.

5. MixMaster – Who’s hasn’t wanted to mix a little something at one point or another?

5 Apps I Hate

1. CraigsMobileList - I like that I can get a little bit of Craigslist with this, I guess. Why are is this interface so crowded though? Why can I save searches but I can’t save pages? Why can’t I get more than 25 results? I’m not sure what happened with this one, and I want my money back.

2. Lander - This, like many basic games for iPhone, could be fun for a minute or two. What bugs me about this application is that I have no idea how to play and there’s no simply no guide / help / rules with the application. Seriously, nothing is unacceptable.

3. Pour1Out- I wanted to like this application, but it simply doesn’t work well.

4. Tasks – The interface isn’t completely intuitive and I think a task application should be a lot more organized.

5. Jott – I’d long ago given up on voice recording services, but only 15 seconds of recording time is still way below my expectations.

One of the things I love about the App Store is how new it is. No one knows what they’re talking about with this thing. The playing field is relatively level, the startup costs seemingly reasonable, and the opportunity I’d there. You can even get paid for your software.

Early entrepreneurs would be smart to use this platform. There aren’t as many iPhone users as there are Internet users, but there’s not nearly as much competition here either. The number of iPhone and iPhone-like phones is only going to continue to grow. Every business has the opportunity to establish themselves in this marketplace. What we’re seeing now is a race to become primary destinations. There are $9.99 applications that do the same as free applications. That’ll change.

It’s going to be great seeing this new market unfold itself (especially if Apple would start releasing these things faster).

As for the WordPress iPhone application — not bad. I don’t think I’ll write many more like this because this has taken forever, but I love that I can if I want to. It’s a bit of a pain without WYSIWYG, and typing HTML on a keyboard is tedious. It just means I would have to keep basic formatting with these posts.

Fortunately though, Kenny Katzgrau was not over his head. I found his blog, Code Fury, where he alluded to a WordPress plugin he was working on that would leverage a stripped down version of Zend_Search_Lucene to greatly improve WordPress searches. As far as I was concerned, this was the best of both worlds. I could play around with lucene, and I could improve Enter Venture’s search function.

After contacting him, Kenny was kind enough to let me play around with an earlier, pre-alpha version of wpSearch. I had a bit of trouble with the initial install, but search results were better than my default WordPress search. The plugin used an Ajax layer to display search results, rather than my native search template, which I didn’t like. Not so anymore.

This version of wpSearch is great. It seamlessly integrates with my Enter Venture search template. It offers the ability to customize the search relevancy on Titles, Content, and Tags, and the results speak for themselves. Just check out the top 5 results for a few keywords with the default WordPress search versus wpSearch:

For the majority of these results, wpSearch finds exactly what I’m looking for while the default WordPress search seems to return the same results time after time. The two have similarly relevant “new york” searches (which is to say, neither is perfect), but wpSearch is perfect on the “book” search as it finds 5 of my 6 book posts in the top 5 results. My 6th book post came in at number 6.

The one knock on wpSearch is that the install may slip some people up. There are a few steps to complete, and it still looks like some kinks need to be worked out based on the WordPress plugins page’s comments. It’s much better than the original version and should only get easier.

Congrats to Kenny for putting together what seems like a potentially great new way to search with WordPress. I look forward to future releases.

Everyone else, let me know what you think of wpSearch.