More tips for the LinkedIn ninja, courtesy of Social Media Examiner:

• "LinkedIn has a ton of authority on Google."
  This is great, as you can basically guarantee that your LinkedIn profile will turn up on the first page of Google, maybe even outranking those drunken photos of you.
• "It is possible to import your Wordpress blog feed to your profile by searching for the Wordpress application. This is a quick way for others to scan your blog content at a glance."
  If you have a blog, why NOT add the Wordpress app?
• "It's not required to be the event coordinator to create an event. An event can be created if you have an interest in going to an event or will be an attendee."
  Just like on Facebook, you can create an event for anything you're looking to attend—then you can see who else in your network is interested in going and maybe even meet up with them. The "Events" page isn't easy to find; you've got to click "More" from the top navigation bar first, and then choose Events, but it's worth it.
• You can change your website links to be more SEO-friendly.
  For example, where it says "My Blog," choose "Edit," and put in a title (or a search term, like "Social Media Marketing.") We're amazed at how many people leave these titles defaulted to "My company," "My Website," etc.

One more tip, courtesy of us, not Social Media Examiner: You can message anyone who shares a group with you, even if they're not otherwise in your network. With some groups boasting thousands of members, how great is that? Don't abuse this feature, but if there's someone you're dying to meet, maybe someone whose brain you'd like to pick, maybe you're already in a group with this person.

More: Rock Your LinkedIn (And What Not To Do)

Do you love travel, culture, giant squid, the environment, and pictures of adorable endangered animals? Of course you do. So that's why you want to apply to this job at Nationalgeographic.com: the site is looking for a freelance online copy editor to copy-edit "energy, water, oceans, biodiversity, sustainable food, green living, climate, weather, and more." What are you waiting for? Hurry up and apply!

More jobs:
San Antonio Magazine is hiring an assistant editor.
BulletinNews Network is hiring a news analyst/editor.
Babcock & Jenkins seeks a director of marketing.
Creative Circle has an open position: a senior web designer.
The Institute of Food Technologies needs a director of media relations.
AOL's Women & Lifestyle programming group needs a senior online product manager.
PM Publicidad has an open position: an account executive.
C. Milan Communications is seeking a PR account coordinator.
SmartBrief seeks a copy editor.
Sotheby's is seeking a proposal writer.
Comedy.com seeks a director of sales and business development.
Tough Mudder wants a event planner.
RAI Ministries has an open position: a communications and public relations manager.
Metro Philadelphia needs a marketing associate.
NFocus Magazine needs a magazine editor.
SkinnyintheCity.com is seeking an account executive of digital ad sales.
Random House's Prima Games wants an associate product manager.
GLG Media has an open position: a senior editor.
The Daily Review seeks a managing editor.

Every day we scour major job boards, including, but not limited to Mediabistro.com's listings, to find the best media jobs out there. We screen out duplicates and scams so you know you're only receiving the top choices.

Weekly unemployment claims fell by 6,000 to 462,000 last week, the Department of Labor reported today. The four-week average rose to 475,500.

Meanwhile, in the week of Feb. 27, California and New York both saw unemployment claims jump by the thousands (+16k for California; +12k for NY), attributed by the states to layoffs in the service industry. (Is not even bartending safe anymore?)

The number of people receiving emergency unemployment benefits—aka those unemployed long-term—dropped the week of Feb. 20 by 160,000, but there are still more than five and a half million people receiving these benefits.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek has shown 25 staffers the door, confirming rumors that another round of layoffs were going to hit the publication before its April relaunch.

Talking Biz News confirms that Tom Lowry, who covered media and marketing, and Michelle Conlin, who covered workplace issues, are both out, and sources say that most of the art and photo departments have lost their jobs as well.

Lowry was with the magazine for 11 years; Conlin ironically (in the Alanis sense) wrote this piece a few months ago.

Employee loyalty to their employers increased in many cases between October 2009 and January 2010, and not simply because people were "just thankful to have a job," according to a new survey from Kelly Services.

In fact, out of the more than 100,000 people surveyed, 27 percent said their loyalty had increased "as a result of how the employers treated workers during the tough times."

Ten percent, however, said their employer's actions had decreased their loyalty toward their company.

And the remaining 63 percent reported no change.

The lesson, writes HRMorning.com? "Employees don't sympathize when they perceive that companies are taking advantage of the times to mistreat workers who, because of the job market, are afraid to look elsewhere." But when a company treats its workers with respect, they understand.

photo: prudencebrown121

Let's say you're a big company and you want to get in on this Employment Branding thing. Good idea.

Let's say you want to do this by having some of your staffers blog. Good idea, again!

But who will you choose to blog?

Christina Capadona-Schmitz, assistant vice president and consultant at PR 20/20, provides some tips: It's not always the "writers" who are the best bloggers, she says. "Look beyond the usual suspects, and find the resources and hidden talents that lie within corporate walls."

She suggests asking your managers to contribute "visionary" content, your marketing/PR/sales staff to engage with audiences, and your more numbers-heavy staff like IT and market research to provide statistics and factual data.

Remember, though—and Capadona-Schmitz touches on this somewhat—that this all takes time and effort. Your IT guys may not be good writers; your CEO may not be interested in writing for a blog if she's used to writing white papers or hell, books. If you're leading the blog, you may have extra work in the form of editing, nagging people to keep up on deadlines, and so on—and it might be easier overall to just hire a freelancer or a social media expert.

Even for people with writing backgrounds, we beg of you—don't just lump the extra responsibility on them without taking some other duty away, or at least giving them a raise. There's a perception that blogging is easy, but that's not always the case, and it always takes time.

Besides, saying "Hey, let's create a blog!" and then deciding who to finger to be the "lucky" contributor (who just had more workload dumped on them) sounds a lot like Aesop's "Belling the cat" fable. In that spirit, we present to you that fable—in Hindi. (Why not?)

In the vein of the do-something-crazy-for-a-year-then-write-a-book-about-it thing, Jason Paul, a recent college grad, is living his life off Craigslist.

Paul, a communications grad from American University who applied to over 180 newspaper jobs before realizing how bad the journalism market sucks, is spending three months in each of three cities, and finding housing, work, and even friends through craigslist.org. He's (of course) blogging about the experience, too, at LivingCraigslist.

The surprising part? It's worked, so far.

In Oakland, Paul found a work-rent exchange with a family looking for someone to take care of the kids, do shopping, cleaning, and so forth. Paul lived rent-and-food-free for three months. "It became a delight to have him, and we started eating dinner with him every night, and he became a part of the family scene," Josh Newman, the "host father," told us.

Paul is now almost done with his stint in Denver, Colorado, working service industry and sales jobs a la Barbara Ehrenreich and will then spend three months in an East Coast city TBD. (You can vote where he'll go through March 15!)

And how has the experience been, really? "It's been up and down," Paul told us by phone last month. "Sometimes I've really enjoyed it and sometimes it's been, 'Oh, another day I have to look on craigslist?' I have found it to be largely successful. In an economy like this, the fact I could secure not one but two jobs in Denver and work in California, that's something about craigslist. It isn't exactly recession-proof but it offers people a chance to beat the economy."

Paul told us he's even made friends through Craigslist, which are part of the self-imposed rules of his term. "I didn't know how possible that was, but I consider them normal friends." This opposed to his early experiences, when he'd bring pepper spray or a third party whenever meeting anyone new. He said he did have one experience—his first housing experience in Denver (which you can read about here) didn't work out, and "it made me remember that not everyone on the site is going to be perfect and you have to be careful."

The point: Not just that hey, anyone can come up with a gimmick nobody's done before and write a book about it, but that craigslist, and free classifieds (which let's not forget are killing newspapers) are a pretty plausible way to make some sort of a living.

Do Freelancers Need to Have a Blog?

Reuters lays out social media guidelines

50 Worst of the Worst (and Most Common) Job Interview Mistakes

WSJ restaurant critic Sokolov resigns after being asked to change beats

Why Corporate Recruiting May Be Doomed

Newsday far From Agreement With Union

B2B Publisher Penton Emerges From Bankruptcy

SXSW PR: A Good Pitch, And A Bad Pitch

We've got a good list of jobs today, covering everything from travel PR ("must be ready to jump on a plane at a moment's notice") to reporting in Michigan for "the best beat in Big Rapids." (Not that they ever specify what that is.)

Myriad Marketing is seeking a travel PR account executive.
Macmillan has an open position: a senior publicist.
Bonnier/Weldon Owen is seeking an executive assistant.
The Daily Times has an open position: a reporter.
Goldstar wants a freelance copywriter.
Swanson Russell wants a writer/producer.
Bloomsbury is looking for a marketing assistant.
Polyglass USA needs a marketing coordinator.
Meltwater Buzz has an open position: a social media sales consultant.
RollingStone.com seeks an account executive, digital sales.
Allbritton Communications wants a corporate director of traffic.
Anjunabeats has an open position: a community manager.
VoodooVox is hiring a director of sales.
Counterpart seeks a production artist.
Remapping Debate is seeking a senior writer.
Atomic PR is hiring a PR account director.
AOL seeks a homepage editor, marketplace and commerce.
re:group is hiring an interactive strategist planner/buyer.
The Oxford University Press needs an associate editor.
The Pioneer is seeking a reporter.

Every day we scour major job boards, including, but not limited to Mediabistro.com's listings, to find the best media jobs out there. We screen out duplicates and scams so you know you're only receiving the top choices.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek staffers are getting unpleasant news tomorrow: in fact, some of them are not going to be Bloomberg Businessweek staffers after tomorrow, DailyFinance reports.

The cuts are expected to be more modest than the last round, which whacked 60 edit-side staffers back in November.

Unemployment decreased in nine states in January compared to the month before, even as unemployment worsened in thirty states.

The lucky nine? Alaska, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, and Oklahama. That's it.

If those numbers didn't do it for you, this chart should prove it's still pretty rough out there.

The Hartford Courant's front page story today covers the problems the unemployed face when taking on temporary work. Not only will taking on work reduce your unemployment check for the days you do work, but after your first year of unemployment, federal law says your next year's benefit is calculated based on the work you did over the first year.

Yeah, seriously.

"By working and knowing it wasn't steady, and it wasn't going to last long, I cut my own throat," one road construction worker told reporter Mara Lee after his benefit check was reduced from $544 a week to $254.

That's because he brought in $1,000 a week for a six-week temporary gig last year.

Others after seeing their benefits cut are selling their homes, splitting up their families, resorting to desperation.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) has proposed a bill that would make it easier for unemployed people to take on temporary work without worrying that their benefits would decrease. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) called the law a "glitch in our current employment laws."

The road construction worker who made $6,000 would have received $544 a week through July; instead, he's getting $254, or a loss of $8,700. But since he got $6,000 through his temp gig, he's less than $3k in the hole. We'd almost have suggested in this situation that he do exactly what he did—working is so good for you on so many levels—it makes you look more hireable, it makes you feel better about yourself, and it may lead to full-time employment—but save some of that $6,000 for the rainy day typhoon that was a-comin. (Course, if you don't know your benefits check will be reduced, you can't squirrel any money away.)

Obviously the best thing to do would be to get the law fixed, but if you were faced with $6k now and negative $3k later, or a steady but small income of $544 a week, what would you do? It's a tough, nearly impossible choice to make, and we wish nobody had to make it, but at least go into it with your eyes open to all the facts.