jobs@gotjava ...

It’s almost 3 years ago now since I was working on architecture and design for the Java Lobby Job Project . A lot of things happened since then. There were only a few sites where you can bid for small projects. Today there are many interesting sites that offer services of that type. http://www.wizbids.com is really close to what we had in mind. I was looking for a review of these sites on the Net, but I could not find it so far. There is however a dedicated section on http://www.rateitall.com . If you are reading this and know one - please drop me a note. Also let me know if you are thinking about writing one, I would like to contribute.

First of all http://www.linkedin.com is really deserved to be mentioned although it’s not really for finding a gig or a job per se, but you can achieve the same goal minus small contract s and bidding part. It puts an emphasis on your personal network and your profile is really a reflection of that. The credibility of the information there is easily verifiable. Linkedin is also allows you to query jobs and contracts from external services.

Here is the list of sites that offer projects for bidding and allow you to build your personal professional profile:

• http://www.guru.com/ rated "Good" (3.58) by rateitall.com
  
• http://www.wizbids.com/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/
• http://www.rentacoder.com/
  
• http://www.elance.com/ 4.0
• http://www.freelance.com/ 3.50
  
• http://www.webprofusion.com/projectbids/
• http://www.getafreelancer.com/
• http://www.scriptlance.com/

I would be really interested to learn about different experiences with these sites. So far from what can tell from my personal experience is that http://www.wizbids.com/is very close to what I had in mind for the service like that. Unfortunately it's very short on IT projects offered. Guru.com on another hand is full of projects, but very slow for some reason. There were also opinions posted on the Slashdot.com about some of the sites. http://www.guru.com/, http://www.wizbids.com/, http://www.elance.com/ get a favorable mention there.