Neologisms spread through the internet at the speed of, well, the internet. A new one appeared over the weekend, reportedly originating at the Pittsburgh Podcamp event, but already showing up in my RSS feeds and Twitter timeline and email: bacn. Apparently this is the term the […] Read more »
Skype Recovers – After a week that the folks at Skype will surely want to forget, Skype gets back to business. Banish Boring RSS with Voyage – If you’re tired of plain-looking online RSS readers, spend some time with this one. Posts are arranged on a […] Read more »
No matter what sort of web work you’re doing, there’s one constant: you’d like to get paid for it. More than 99% of the time, this is going to mean sending a bill – more usually called an invoice – to your client and waiting for […] Read more »
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In the past, we’ve considered the question of whether the current crop of mega-monitors actually work to enhance productivity. But there’s another option that web workers, at least those with a relatively stable desk, ought to look seriously at: multiple monitors. Instead of buying one single […] Read more »
Entrepreneur.com and Zoho have gotten together (with sponsorship from Visa) to launch Entrepreneur Assist, a new portal page that tries to combine a number of useful functions for those with an entrepreneurial bent. The site tries to combine Entrepreneur’s business knowledge with Zoho’s online office suite […] Read more »
In an obvious nod to Twitter’s signature question “what are you doing?,” the new free service PingMe asks “what should you be doing?” instead. The answer, apparently, is anything that you care to remind yourself to do. Like Twitter, PingMe offers mobile phone integration, but with […] Read more »
It’s Monday morning and it’s time for your perfectly nutritious, balanced, tasty breakfast. You prepare the farm-fresh free-range eggs to perfection, slice the imported ham, whisk up the Bearnaise sauce, choose the most mouth-watering strawberries, grind the coffee beans and put them in the cold-press maker…well, […] Read more »
The new web worker faces a myriad of decisions, from what to put on business cards to what business structure to choose. Running through many of these decisions is a single thread: what company name will you operate under? Even if you’re a one man show […] Read more »
As web workers, we’re all used to a certain amount of resistance to our way of doing business. This is understandable; new ideas take time to be accepted, and as Thomas Kuhn pointed out they sometimes don’t really take hold until the proponents of the old […] Read more »
As usual, the annual Yearly Kos convention of liberal bloggers spawned a few new ideas, including this one: a labor union for bloggers. The idea immediately drew a great deal of online discussion, ranging from reasoned consideration to howls of derision. With many web workers running […] Read more »
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Task lists have a natural ebb and flow. We all add new tasks to our own list of things to be done as they occur to us (or, in some cases, as they’re assigned to us), and cross them off as they get finished. You can […] Read more »
Most of us would probably agree that social networking is reaching its limits. Between social network fatigue and the increasing multiplication of niche social networks (I’ve seen announcements of at least three different networks for dogs and their owners recently), this particular corner of the web […] Read more »
Draw anywhere with DrawAnywhere – If you can remember what you want to do, you can remember the URL for this Flash-based diagramming tool. It’s got drag and drop objects and connectors, sharing, and export to graphics formats and PDF. But “Senior Writer” Wasn’t in the […] Read more »
One of the things that seems to most perplex new freelance web workers is setting an appropriate hourly rate. As a starting point, let me tell you how not to do it: do not take your current weekly salary for doing the same work as an […] Read more »
Being a web worker means, almost by definition, being dependent on email. For many of us it also means connecting to the web over a variety of networks: wired and wireless, home and work, coffeeshop and client. Therein lies the problem. Sooner or later, you’ll hit […] Read more »
Way back in the dark days of computing, I used to conduct training classes for people who were seeing Windows and using a mouse for the very first time. In those classes, we insisted that solitaire wasn’t a game: it was a training device to help […] Read more »
Over the weekend, there was a brief flurry of blog activity because some of the popular kids decided they’d had enough of Facebook because they were too popular and couldn’t handle all the activity (no, I’m not going to link – if they can’t manage the […] Read more »
As web workers, we spend our days moving through a constantly-shifting landscape of services and servers. Our lives, livelihoods, and identities are all wrapped up in a cloud of hardware and software maintained by other people. When it all works, it’s great. But what do you […] Read more »
When people find out that I’ve been working from home for years, they often respond with both envy and fear: “I’d like to do that myself…but I can’t afford to give up my paycheck. How could I possibly get started in a web work career? How […] Read more »
Well-known .NET developer Scott Hanselman is gearing up to leave the corporate office and work out of a home office, and as part of his preparation he’s asking readers a question that should resonate with many web workers: where is your current third place? The “third […] Read more »
Not every web worker is a web designer, of course. But enough of us at least dabble in that side of things that it’s worth keeping an eye on tools to make web page design easier and better. Here are a couple that I ran across […] Read more »
Presumably you haven’t been living under a rock, so you know that CNN and YouTube just hosted a presidential debate in which allegedly normal people got to use YouTube to ask questions of the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. By all media accounts, this was […] Read more »
You web workers are the passionate sort – we can tell by the number of comments we get here (and we love you for it!). But for most people, leaving well thought out, useful comments on blog entries is an act of pure charity: your effort […] Read more »
I can’t help it. Even though Safari has a nicer looking UI, and the most recent Windows update is leaking memory like a sieve, I keep running Firefox as my primary Web browser. Why? Because no other browser has managed to give me anything like the […] Read more »
Some web workers are essentially workspace parasites, hopping from coffeeshop to client site without ever settling down in a space to call their own. Most of us, though, spend at least some of our time in the home office, or at least the home-corner-of-the-family-room. Assuming that […] Read more »
There’s a fascinating article in Arab News today: “IT Ministry to Create Women-Only Work Centers.” It seems that the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology is putting a major amount of money into setting up women-only office spaces from which workers could telecommute to […] Read more »
One of the great attractions of web work is supposed to be the ability to work anywhere, right? And now that we’re at the height of summer, the urge is strong to charge up the laptop and head to the beach or the mountains or even […] Read more »
I’ve seen these numbers thrown about several times lately (perhaps you have too): only 40% of small and medium businesses support working at home, compared to 76% of large businesses. Thus, web workers have a better chance of finding a home at big organizations. As someone […] Read more »
Beta Watch: A couple of interesting-looking new sites are doing the “send us your email address for a beta invite” thing. Iceberg On Demand is another attempt at the perennial theme of letting non-technical users build their own enterprise applications, this time in the web browser. […] Read more »
I know that as a web worker it’s easy to lose track of time and date, but just in case you haven’t noticed: it’s Friday the 13th. Of course, enlightened workers of the 21st century that we are, we don’t worry so much about broken mirrors […] Read more »
Over the last several years we’ve seen a continuing effort to re-implement traditional desktop applications in the browser. By now you can find plenty of word processors, spreadsheets, and drawing programs that run in any modern browsers. Now formatpixel has entered the fray with a new […] Read more »
We’ve talked before about one of the big divisions in web workerdom, the one between pilers and filers. But how you do your work is at least as important as how you put things away when you’re done, and there’s a potential personality clash lurking here […] Read more »
You’ve gone out and bought your new iPhone. And like many of web workers, you’re addicted to the fast-paced social network Twitter (which, we’ll remind you, is useful professionally). But Twitter’s own lackluster mobile interface looks downright blah on your sexy new phone. What to do? […] Read more »
So you’re working along at the coffee shop, latte at your elbow, building a great system for your client. But what do you do when some piece isn’t completely clear in your mind? In a cubicle farm, you could walk down the corridor and chat with […] Read more »
Nudist on the day shift – According to the American Association for Nude Recreation and The Naturist Society, “working from home, in the nude, is in fact increasing in popularity!” It’s one of the activities they recommend for the annual Nude Recreation Week, July 9-15. Zoho […] Read more »
Ever since the days of gopher, web workers have been looking for better ways to find things on the web. After the rise and fall of the big directories, search has ruled the roost, and we all know that a tremendous amount of search traffic crosses […] Read more »
Part of being a web worker is getting some actual work done once in a while. Whether it’s writing a proposal, creating a web site, banging out code, or auditing financials, web work tends to require concentration. But the same tools that help us be connected […] Read more »
Prominent software consultant Christopher Hawkins announced yesterday what we might characterize as the “baby and the bathwater” solution to dealing with information overload. He’s unsubscribing from all his RSS feeds, deleting all his browser bookmarks, and leaving all his social networks: There is a limited amount […] Read more »
We’ve written before (and had a lively debate about) the benefits of outsourcing the nonessential activities in your life – housekeeping, lawn care, project management, bookkeeping, and so on. Now comes the news, via a BBC reporter, that some people are actually making real money blogging […] Read more »
It’s Monday again – for some of you, it’s the first Monday in a new fiscal year. And for all too many web workers, that means that once again it’s time to face the horrid thought of opening an email client and seeing an inbox filled […] Read more »
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