The smaller, 4.8-inch display S5 is also squatting on NewEgg’s site — the same three model names as the X70EX are there for $549, $599 and $799. Again, the base feature set is pretty standard with the options coming in for a 1.33GHz CPU over a 1.2GHz unit, hard drive or SSD and integrated 3G. NewEgg is offering some special extras on some configurations: a case, extra battery or other accessory.

It’s been over three years since the original Origami Project concept, but in my opinion, the S5 and X70EX are what we were hoping for back then. I’m curious if folks agree. Assuming you do, it makes you wonder about the original concept to begin with since these devices are generally still considered niche products. Then again, they can be found at Amazon, Buy.com and other mainstream sites these days, too. Maybe we hoped for too much three years ago? Or maybe we’re all still a little ahead of our time. I feel better thinking of it that way. ;)

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Image by sxc.hu user Zela

I called one of my friends earlier this week and asked her if we could have lunch on Sunday. I was surprised that she said she couldn’t make it, since she had to work. “What kind of evil forces are making you do this?” I asked her. Then again, who was I kidding? I was planning to write a couple of blog posts on Sunday evening. Like my friend, I was going to work during the weekend.

As I reviewed my own work habits, as well as those of other web workers, it became evident that working during the weekends is becoming more common.

The weekend is dynamic

These days, the definition of “weekend” isn’t as firm as it used to be. Many corporate employees I know say that, as part of cost-cutting measures, their employers give them a four-day work week. This leaves them three days of the week for rest and recreation. These three days aren’t fixed either, as they find themselves taking Wednesdays, Sundays and Saturdays off during one fiscal quarter, and a different combination of days the following quarter.

If you’re self-employed, you even have the option of changing your work week in such a way that a weekday can be your “weekend”. For example, if there’s an event I have to go to in the middle of the week, I “pretend” that it’s a Saturday and move my schedule around to turn one of my weekend days into a working day. I also do this when I find myself sick for a couple of days. Just make sure that when you change your work days around it doesn’t conflict with anything that a client or supervisor expects from you.

Weekend warriors

In the economic downturn, it’s common for traditionally employed workers to take on a second job during the weekends. Because of the flexibility it offers, self-employment is one of the more popular options. This is also one of the reasons why the number of small businesses tend to rise during a recession.

There are other reasons why employees might opt to work during the weekend. If they want to secure their position in the company, they’ll be more willing to go the extra mile and work during the weekends if it means getting on the good side of their supervisors.

Even freelancers might find themselves working during the weekend. Apart from the economic factors, the low work-life separation makes it easier for leisure and work time to intersect or overlap. For example, I sometimes get the urge to work on non-billable tasks during the weekends. I find myself writing invoices, doing a bit of self-promotion, or trying to prepare my work for the following week. Fellow WWD blogger Dawn Foster even gets things done during the holidays.

Many freelancers might also use the weekend to pursue side projects. Often, these are non-profit or low-profit projects. We work on these things because they allow us to give back to the community, as well as explore ideas and tasks that we don’t get to do on a normal work day.

Whether it’s the economic crisis or a force of habit, there are a variety of reasons why some people work during the weekends. I just hope that no matter how productive we get during the week, we won’t forget to make enough time for rest.

Do you find yourself working during the weekend?

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Recently, Glary Utilities got an upgrade. If you haven’t used this set of tools before, there are more good reasons to do so.

Glary Utilities is a suite of mini applications that can give your PC a complete tune-up. It has good tools for removing temporary files that slow performance and for optimizing your hard drive. You can do a complete hard drive defrag with it, or, if that’s too time-consuming take faster steps to cleaning up a drive.

The suite also includes tools for memory optimization, and for cleaning your Windows Registry (make sure to make a backup, though, which Glary prompts you to do. Some of the new additions in the upgrade to Glary Utilities are aimed at better performance as well.

The Glary suite now includes a startup delayer that allows you to customize which applications you want to load at boot time. I wrote about a standalone utility that does this once before. If you’ve been using a Windows system for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with how loading applications every time you restart causes long waits. You can cut your boot times by more than half by using these utilities to optimize startup routines.

There are more enhancements in the new version of Glary Utilities. It’s a quick download, too. Try a few of the one-click utilities and you’ll probably immediately start noticing better performance.

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Here’s how it looks and works.

As seen below, the Google Toolbar for Firefox collects thumbnails of your most visited sites in a way similar to how Chrome does so. It also collects your recent bookmarks and your recently closed tabs in one place. Especially if you tend to concentrate on a handful of sites throughout the day, these features make navigating faster and easier.  The toolbar also lets you jump straight to Gmail, search news sites quickly, and more.

In a post on the Google blog you’ll find information on many of the new features, and Google also has a Help Center for the Toolbar, with a Getting Started guide, details on browsing tools, and more. The Toolbar remains a beta project, and you can send Google requests for additions here.

Note that the thumbnail gathering is not supported in Firefox 2. You need to be running version 3 or greater.

The Google Toolbar for Firefox remains my default toolbar in the browser, and the new features are useful. Along with the speed improvements in the beta versions of Firefox 3.1, you can get things done faster.

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The above is a conversation I’ve had to have with clients time and time again, although not in those exact words, of course. Often, I later realized, it actually was my fault. In the early days of my career, I wasn’t providing clients with enough of an end-to-end solution. I short-sightedly forgot that when you’re transferring IP, it’s important to make sure that the client (and all of the client’s staff who will be involved) will be able to use whatever it is I’ve produced for them, for as long as the tool is in active use.

What that shouldn’t mean is that I end up acting as tech support for the rest of my days. What it should mean is that I provide them with enough resources up front that they don’t have to call me every five seconds to ask how to change or update something. Here are some tools you should provide to help make the handover as one-way as possible.

FAQ

Preferably generated through actual use cases and interactions with client staff. For example, if you’re providing a client with a web site, these might be questions that they themselves will receive from clients, like “What is the optimal browser for viewing the site?”, or they might be questions that client staff have about the update/modification process, like “What size images work best for the site’s homepage?”

User Guide

You’ve seen them, you’ve used them, now it’s time to make one. A user guide is an invaluable tool for any kind of deliverable you may be producing for a client. Usually, user guides are living documents and will continue to grow and be added to by client staff.

My advice for producing these is to start with a best-in-class survey, so dust off those that you’ve received packed with software, hardware, etc. and get a feel for the genre. Also, try to strike a balance, if possible, between visual and textual learners, by providing both ample descriptions and screenshots where appropriate. Also, use Clear Writing principles to maximize readability.

Quick Reference Card

Chances are, the people you’re turning over your deliverable to are no more inclined to read through an exhaustive manual or guide to find out what they want then you are. Hence the beauty of the Quick Reference Card. There are plenty of these documents available online, so it isn’t hard to find reference documents to work from.

The danger here is to go overboard and try to provide too much information. Remember, it isn’t supposed to be a manual.

You can also provide different versions of these documents for different stakeholders. Someone producing content might need a flow chart outlining the content approval process, for example, while someone responsible for changing code might need a basic HTML reference.

It can be hard to anticipate every possible question that a client will have after the project is handed over, but after a while you’ll get used to guessing the kinds of things they’ll expect answers to, and all of the above documents will be the better for it. Even if you’re not a pro, though, start using these documents and I promise your phone will ring less, or at least less for the wrong reasons and more for the right ones.

What strategies do you use for minimizing support after handing over your projects? Is some support inevitable?

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So how do you host simultaneous online/virtual events? Very carefully, of course, but here are a few tips to help you straddle both worlds and pull off both events without a hitch.

1. Get Virtual Help

Before you delve into virtual world event planning, make sure you have established a talented team who are active in the virtual world, but also who you know and trust. I work mostly with people who I have met not only virtually but also in the real world, because there is an added accountability aspect to contacts you’ve met face to face. That said, I also have worked extensively with folks who I only know through the virtual world – in this case, Second Life. I don’t even know their real names and pay them either with Linden (Second Life’s currency) or on PayPal. My virtual world team includes designer Liadona Rau (whom I met in person after we had met in Second Life), multimedia developer KrisBott Gears (who used to work for me at Cybergrrl, Inc. in real life back in the 90s), and designer Chepooka Laval (whom I work with in real life in Alaska and whom I encouraged to get “inworld”).

2. Know the Lay of the Land

Not only am I personally familiar with the ins and outs of Second Life, just from rolling up my sleeves and trying things out, but I also co-own a virtual island so have a sandbox in which to develop things. This also means that I have a location to hold events when clients don’t have their own land. Because I’m so familiar with the potential of Second Life, the minute I’m approached to do a virtual event to complement a live event, I immediately know at least a dozen things that we can and should do for the Second Life version.

3. Think 3-D and Interactive

While it is a given that there should be branded and information-oriented posters at your virtual world event, you can easily go beyond the flat billboard-style signage. For my virtual events, some of the posters are also “notecard givers”,  meaning that avatars can obtain a notecard with background information about the company, organization or event, just by clicking on them. Other posters immediately launch a browser window, which opens on the web site of the party host. Notecard givers can also be set up to automatically email you the name of each avatar clicking on your object to receive items.

4. Think Promo Items (Freebies)

Nothing makes an avatar happier than receiving free gifts. I learned early on how to make t-shirts in Second Life and have a side virtual business making branded, promotional t-shirts for events, companies and organizations. For a recent event I held on Athena Island (the one I co-own) for Quaker Oatmeal, I turned to a virtual friend, MincedMedia Clip, to make an enormous virtual steaming bowl of oatmeal, complete with a spoon. To top it off, if an avatar clicked on the big bowl, they received an individual, small bowl of oatmeal with a virtual spoon that had an “eat” animation in it to animate the avatar scooping out oatmeal and eating it.

5. Show the Virtual Event in Real Life

At the Quaker Oatmeal live event, we had several laptops logged into Second Life, and some of us participated both in the real world and the virtual event at the same time. We were able to let others who were not familiar with Second Life look over our shoulders to demonstrate what was happening. At a previous event for Rasmuson Foundation in Anchorage, Alaska, the simultaneous Second Life event was projected onto a big screen in a performing arts center theatre. Having the virtual world component during a real-world event can build excitement and leave a lasting impression on the attendees.

6. Stay on Message Virtually

Because the Second Life aspect of a real world event can easily become the “main attraction,” make sure what you do virtually is in line with what is happening in the real world. Make sure the messaging is clear, the branding consistent, and the discussion relevant. It is too easy to get sidetracked in a virtual world, however, having “hosts” at events can keep the conversations running smoothly and key messages communicated frequently.

7. Hire Security

While your real world event probably doesn’t need a security detail, in Second Life, for example, security at events is smart. It is so easy to build and create objects in Second Life, and it is just as easy for a troublemaker – or “griefer” – to do the same at your event. There are folks in Second Life who make good Linden as security guards. Give them the permissions they need to boot out (eject) any pesky griefers and to remove obnoxious objects from your land. Before I started hiring security, I had several great events disrupted by griefers,  but now that I have them, not a single event has been attacked.

8. Spread the Virtual Word

Holding an event in Second Life doesn’t only enhance the real world event itself, but it also enhances the promotions and buzz factor of your event. There is an entire strata of Second Life bloggers, Second Life Facebookers, Second Lifers on MySpace, Twitter, Plurk, and more. Almost everyone who blogs their Second Life does so exclusively, so they will only write about things they experience or hear about inworld. When you provide interesting events in Second Life that add value to the world and provide value to the avatar, chances are you’ll get a good deal of extra ink and mentions in the social mediasphere because of your Second Life initiatives.

Overall, holding a virtual event at the same time as a real world event takes careful coordination and strategic attention to detail. Don’t skimp on your Second Life event or treat it as an afterthought. Virtual world events are valuable to, and attended by, people from  all over the world. You can expand your reach quickly and exponentially when you hold a virtual world event.

Have you organized real world/virtual world events? What has worked for you? What hasn’t?

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Those are all very good uses, and benefit you as a web worker immensely. The only question I have as a visitor is, how do they benefit me? Yes, they help if I’m considering you as a prospective contractor for a job, but if I’m not, then the site quickly loses relevance. A blog should be doing work all the time, even when it isn’t speaking directly to your professional history and identity. Here’s how to make sure it is.

Keep ‘Em Coming

The best way to make sure a blog is doing work for you is to make sure that it will attract repeat visitors, even if those visitors aren’t currently interested in you professionally, since they may be at some later date. How do you get people to come back? Make sure they see your site as a growing, live resource.

Be a Research Assistant

The only way to do this is to make sure that you show them you can provide the information your visitors are looking for easier, quicker, and better than they can find it themselves. That doesn’t mean replicating Google search results. That means pre-searching, collecting, and annotating useful links and resources, and keeping them up to date. Case in point, if I’m looking for Twitter resources, I don’t go to Google, I go to TwiTip.com first.

Make link collections easy to find and clearly titled, possibly placing permalinks to relevant posts in your blog’s sidebar or header. Context and a human touch is especially important with these, since otherwise visitors will mistrust them as the products of automated web spiders and bots.

Humanize, Humanize, Humanize

That brings me to my next point, which is that you should make your blog as human as possible without being overly personal. I would avoid ads unless your blog is your primary source of income, or limit them to a very few which redirect to relevant sites to which you personally contribute or with which you’re involved.

The tone and content of your writing shouldn’t be too formal. The potential clients you want reading your blog probably spend a good chunk of their day reading formal business writing, press releases, etc., and your blog will fall off their radar if it comes across as too similar to those things. In the end, people are looking to connect with other people, not with dry instructional manuals.

Don’t Become a One-Trick Pony

Specialization is important. People respect specialists and look to them for solutions to pressing problems. That said, while there is nothing wrong with showing off your specialization on your blog, don’t make it the exclusive focus. You risk alienating everyone in your audience, and it will be especially hard to encourage repeat visits from casual readers.

It’s also important to show readers that you are not living inside a bubble. Web workers are prized for their ability to come up with non-linear solutions and adapt. That flexibility of mind will come across if you show a willingness to step outside your comfort zone once in a while and address different topics.

Get Beyond the “You” in Your Blog

Of course, since it represents you, it should primarily feature your content. That’s primarily, not exclusively. Having guest bloggers contribute content to your blog not only encourages an influx of readers who wouldn’t ordinarily find your site, but also provides a different take on who you are.

In soliciting guest posts, you present prospective clients with an example of your resourcefulness, and your ability to successfully network and make important connections in your chosen space. You also tell clients who you are by telling them who you associate with, something to keep in mind when selecting potential guest bloggers.

Some of these tips may be obvious, and others might not quite fit with what you have in mind, but at the very least, they should help you think more critically about how you represent yourself on the web, and that’s always a good thing.

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The interactive event is being hosted by Sramana Mitra, a successful entrepeneur, Forbes columnist, and author of the book Entrepeneurial Journeys.

The webinar is to be held tomorrow, January 14th, at 11am PSt/2pm EST, and free registration is available at Eventbrite.  Dimdim is hosting and providing the underlying conferencing application for the event.

According to an advisory, Sramana will be speaking about and taking audience questions on:

Forming a business idea
How to find great mentors
How to fund your business idea
Mistakes to avoid

Sramana founded three technology-based companies, two of which were acquired. She has also had marketing and venture capital roles in a number of other technology startups, including web-based businesses, so web workers may find her input valuable, and may want to pose questions to her.

Disclosure: Simply Hired is partnered with the GigaOm Network, parent of WebWorkerDaily.

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Now, Yugma has just announced several improvements to its free and paid plans that can make a big difference for those who regularly use this application. At the top of the list of improvements is a fix for a bone I had picked before.

Room for more meeting participants in Yugma’s free version was at the top of my wish list for version 4.0 when I wrote about it last month. Yugma has historically only allowed 10 meeting participants in its free version, while the open source free conferencing application Dimdim has routinely allowed 20 participants. That shortcoming has been addressed, and you can now have 20 participants in a free Yugma conference.

There are also a number of changes to the paid Yugma plans, including a 25 percent reduction in the cost of the Yugma Pro plan, which is now available for $14.95 a month. The paid versions of Yugma allow for very large groups of meeting participants and the lower prices may attract many people, but I think a lot of web workers will be happy with the 20-participant threshold that Yugma Free now offers. Among the new service additions, there is also an inexpensive option for putting on webinars, at $19.95 a month for all Yugma Pro subscribers.

If you haven’t upgraded Yugma in a while, definitely use the latest version 4.0. Among other conveniences, you can invite people to online meetings without requiring them to have downloaded and installed Yugma. Some of the lowest prices now available for Yugma services are only availabe until February 15th, so if you’re interested, look into the additions listed here.

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