Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Unemployment is hovering near 10 percent, and last week a survey of 44 professional forecasters released by the National Association for Business Economics predicted the unemployment rate would in fact hit that mark in the first quarter of 2010 before dropping to 9.5 percent by year’s end. But it will be 2012 before the market regains most of the jobs lost in the recession, NABE says.

That might get you thinking what the job market is like for Web 3.0 specialists. Job search engine Indeed.com is one tool to help you get a feel for things.

First, the not-so-good news: IT Job postings in general have decreased 33 percent since September, while clicks on Information Technology jobs have increased 71 percent since September 2008, according to the site’s stats. For IT workers looking for a job, the opposite situation would clearly be preferable. Job trends are based on Indeed’s index of more than 50 million jobs a year.

When it comes to Web 3.0, however, there may be a more encouraging story to tell. Exploring some of the specific technologies behind the semantic web, for example, it seems there’s a rising call for expertise in working both with RDF, the data format for representing metadata about web resources and exchanging information among systems, and SPARQL, the query language behind the semantic web for data that is stored either as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware, based on the results of a search pairing those terms. Those jobs – which span the spectrum from IT roles such as web platform developers to database architects to knowledge and software engineers, all the way to non-IT gigs such as research scientists—pay well too, plateauing at an average of $134,000.

Split them up for separate searches, though, and it appears the term SPARQL actually carries more weight than RDF in the job postings category.

A more general search on the term “semantic” shows an uptick in postings, while searching on “semantic web” actually shows a downward trend. Don’t be discouraged, though: A scan of jobs available in both categories indicates—fittingly enough—that it’s mostly a matter of semantics in the job posting language that drive these results. Many of the jobs categorized under the more generalized term “semantic,” for instance, could easily have been posted under “semantic web” – such as the many calling for a strong understanding of semantic markup. Whichever term you search, salaries settle in the $85,000 average area.

The site also reports that it’s seeing “social networking” popping up more often in job postings. Such jobs have been on a pretty steady curve upward since 2005, and Indeed.com says salaries for job “social networking” job postings nationwide, at a $75,000 average, are 19 percent higher than average salaries for all job postings nationwide.

And yes, you can search specifically on “Twitter” jobs if you like. In addition to Twitter’s own searches posted there, you’ll find calls out there for folks with knowledge of the Twitter API -- and at least one quick freelance gig posting already-written messages about a company on the social network!.

It’s also enlightening—as a general insight into who are the winners and who perhaps will be the also-rans in the social networking space—to use Indeed.com to do a comparison of the number of job postings mentioning Facebook vs. MySpace. For now, it’s 8,241 for Facebook vs. 2,101 for MySpace.