“When I was solo, I mostly worked on the ‘get whatever was in front of me done’ track more often than not, because I was kind of rebelling from my former project management days. Now, because I have a team again, I’m having to warm myself back into having projects with obvious components — beginnings, middles, and ends — and with all the heartache of multiple human points of contact,” says Brogan. “The good news is that I know what I like and what I don’t. The bad news is that if I’m going to grow this business, I’ll have to grow up, stop rebelling, and use a project system that works for everyone. I can swear this, though: it won’t be some rigid overworked project management system, and it won’t be something on Rails.”

The Right Tools for the Right Team

It’s taken Brogan and his team at New Marketing Labs some trial and error to find the tools with the right fit. He says, “We’ve settled on something homegrown, only because it worked best for a multitude of things, and / or because we wanted to integrate a few things.”

But the solution that works best at New Marketing Labs isn’t necessarily what Brogan needs on other projects. Human Business Works, which soft-launched in June, is managed through a handful of spreadsheets in Google Docs. This approach has already worked well for Brogan when he collaborated on his book, “Trust Agents.” His co-author, Julien Smith, and he simply wrote the project in a shared Google Doc and talked about it through IM.

Brogan has found that it’s not just a question of the right tools, but the right fit: “I definitely use different tools for different people, because some people are more ‘right brain.’ Other people are more interested in linear time. It’s definitely a situation where I mix and match project styles to the collaborator or team.”

Making the Transition from Individual to Enterprise

The process of managing the change between working solo and collaborating with a team may be a little bumpy, but Brogan has noticed one challenge in his changeover that has particularly stood out. “In managing a team, I have to slow down and educate. I have to teach them to fish instead of firing off little bits. In fact, I’m more at risk of just letting people roam off into the jungles and figure out how they’ll get it done themselves, but then, that can really cause angst. I tend to believe that most people know how to do whatever they’re sent to do. Only I forget that most people don’t remember that.”

If he was making the transition today, Brogan suggests that the big change he would make would be to record the reasoning behind why he does things the way he does: “I’d have spent a little more time documenting my thought process, so that people could unravel it at their own pace.”

Have you made the transition from working solo to collaborating with a team? What lessons did you learn?

Photo by Flickr user affiliatesummit, licensed under CC 2.0

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Nick Ohrn and I’m a freelance software developer. I mostly work on websites, primarily with WordPress (editor’s note: please see disclosure at the bottom). I’ve been freelance full-time since graduating from college two years ago and have had the opportunity to work on some awesome projects with great people.

I live in Seattle with my fiancee Angela (who is also my business partner).

What is a typical day like for you?

A typical day consists of getting up and heading to the gym for a grueling workout. After that, I hit the bricks by checking email and my project management system. Every day I generate a list of things that absolutely must get done (with a 3-item limit) and then I hit them out. The nice to-do items always come last.

I’m on instant messenger throughout the day across a variety of protocols and generally have one or two short status calls a day. After work is done, I usually go for a run or hit the stadium stairs at the local field.

What gear and software do you use, and why?

I have two computers on my desk at any one time. The first is my custom-built PC running Windows 7. It is a powerhouse, sporting 16GB of RAM, an Intel n920 processor, and dual 24″ monitors. I use my PC for all development work. The most important software it runs is Aptana Studio, Visual Studio 2010 and Firefox with the Firebug development tool.

I also have a 13″ Macbook Pro  that I use for email, IM and writing. I use Apple Mail to handle my multiple mail accounts and prefer TextMate for writing (always in Textile). By using each computer for a single purpose — the PC for development work and the Mac for communication — I make sure I’m always concentrating on a single thing at a time.

Most of the software I use to run my business is web-based:

• Basecamp. Great project management software that is simple for my clients to use and great for me to provide a record of everything that goes on in a project.
• Highrise. The best way to keep track of email correspondence and contacts. It has saved my butt on multiple occasions when I’ve needed to find out who said what and when.
• Springloops. Hosted SVN (soon to add Git) and deployment software. All my client repositories are hosted with Springloops.
• Harvest. The best time tracking and invoicing application on the web. I’ve been using it for over two years and I love it to death.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

You need to know what you’re going to do on any single day and then just get it done. I pick three things that need to be accomplished and accomplish them before doing anything else. Sometimes you’re done by noon, sometimes it takes until 7PM, but knowing what you’re going to be doing certainly lowers the stress level running your own business.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Matthew Humphries, and I’m a freelance video game designer and technology blogger. I both write for and edit the website Geek.com on a daily basis. On the game design side, I handle a range of tasks: Creating initial game design overviews, fleshing out ideas into full design documents, story creation, script writing, gameplay reviews, prototype implementation and consultation on projects already in full production.

What’s a typical day like for you?
A typical day for me starts at 6 a.m. with a good breakfast while watching the news away from my computer. I then get up-to-date with all the technology news that’s popped up on my RSS and Twitter feeds overnight, before spending time filtering out the important stuff that needs covering that day, pushing it out to our writers and then writing up any stories that need to be made live on the site as quickly as possible. As I live in the UK and work for a U.S. website I have the advantage of being awake several hours before our main audience.

I try to finish up writing by 1 p.m., break for a 30-minute lunch and then move on to any design projects I have in progress for the afternoon. This work is quite varied: One day I might be creating a flowchart mapping out decision scenarios for the latest level in a game; the next, I might be writing the conversations key characters have during a cutscene, or producing top-down level maps, character designs, or playing the latest build of a new iPhone game and supplying feedback to a team.

I usually finish up contract work by 6 p.m., take a break to eat and relax until 9 p.m., then take some time to work on my own game projects. Although I don’t consider it a core part of my work, I have also been known to create the odd website for small business clients who don’t have the funds to hire a company to put one together for them.

What gear and software do you use, and why?

My main computer is a Windows 7 Intel Core 2 Duo desktop machine that I built myself. It’s hooked up to two 24-inch monitors, which gives me a huge productivity boost due to the added screen real estate and ability to use one screen as a reference area while I work on the other. I also have an 11-inch Compaq netbook running Windows XP, which has a 5-hour battery life and is easy to carry when visiting clients. Importantly, it’s also powerful enough to run builds of games due to the Nvidia ION graphics chipset Compaq kindly decided to ship it with. Finally I have a Windows XP nettop hooked up to a little 17-inch monitor for times when I don’t want any of the distractions of my main machine, and the netbook is unsuitable due to its small screen.

I use Google Docs when writing away from my main desktop machine. For design work I rely on OpenOffice.org as it’s completely free, but has very competent text document, spreadsheet and drawing/presentations capabilities. My flowchart creation is done in an application called Dia, and drawing/animation tasks are handled by Inkscape. Google Docs is growing by leaps and bounds, however, and I can see it being a complete replacement for OpenOffice.org and Dia before too long.

Gameplay prototyping requires a tool that allows for the quick creation of playable demos. In this regard I have found nothing better than Game Maker due to its simplicity, and at around $20 it’s a very cheap solution, too.

Other software I rely on includes:

• Firefox is my browser of choice, due to its large array of useful add-ons. My favorites include: LastPass, Download Statusbar, Gmail Notifier, WOT and FaviconizeTab.
• Pidgin for IM management across multiple accounts.
• Skype for chatting with clients from all over the world.
• TweetDeck for Twitter stream management. It’s quite a resource hog due to its use of Adobe AIR, but does the job of managing Twitter very well.
• Google Reader is the best RSS feed management I have found, and its built-in language translation is a killer feature.
• Paint.NET for image editing. It’s free, simple and fast.
• Avira Premium Security Suite as an all-in-one Window security solution. It’s worth paying for security and peace of mind when it comes to PC security.
• Screamer Radio for listening to online radio and helping me get through the day uninterrupted.
• Instapaper for saving web pages I really need to read later.
• Notepad++ for code and script writing as it supports just about every language, as well as being free to use.
• Sumatra PDF is a very lightweight alternative to Acrobat Reader that I highly recommend.
• Secunia PSI ensures all of my installed software is up-to-date without me having to go check each one manually.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

I’ve already mentioned the productivity gains I saw from having a second display hooked up to my machine. So much time can be wasted minimizing and maximizing windows, especially when you need to reference several documents. Two large screens, or even three if your machine can take it, make you a faster worker. I also find this works well if you mainly use a laptop: Hook up a larger screen if you can.

My other big tip is to always have paper and pen handy, and to make sure you use them every day. I use a small recycled paper notepad for writing down my to-do list every night before I go to bed. I also make notes throughout the day as writing stuff down really helps me to remember it. Writing every day has another couple of advantages, too. If you work on a PC all day it’s much harder to write if you haven’t for a few weeks, so it helps keep your hand used to using a pen. The other big advantage I find is it can help stave off RSI. By switching from holding your mouse to writing every so often you are giving your hand and lower arm a break. I’ve got no medical evidence to back this claim up, but it works for me.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Who are you and what do you do?

My name’s Christopher Mims, and I’m a regular, dinosaur-type freelance journalist. A lot of what I write ends up in magazines such as Scientific American, Wired and Popular Science. I also write a great deal for the web, mostly for Technology Review and ScientificAmerican.com.

There’s been a great deal of hand-wringing of late over the “fate of journalism,” but it’s important, I think, to realize that the media is a very inhomogeneous industry: newspapers are suffering, but a lot of magazines are doing OK, and the advent of the web has meant a whole new demand for daily news and blogging from traditional journalists.

It also helps to have a niche. As a science and technology journalist, there is (I like to imagine) a certain level of expertise separating me from, say, music journalists. Not to impugn their work, but it’s hard to stay in a field where a million bloggers have, in essence, utterly replaced you.

What’s a typical day like for you?

The only thing that makes up for my inability to buy my own health insurance is the fact that I can put off the start of my day until 10 a.m. — after the baby is with his sitter, after I’ve made breakfast, after I’ve listened to a bunch of the podcasts I rely on to keep me abreast of areas that I cover, such as technology, science and the environment, from the BBC, NPR and PRI. The rest of the day could consist of any combination of research, interviews and writing. An unfortunate percentage of my day often consists of simply tracking down experts and getting them to agree to an interview time and date that’s compatible with my deadline.

A good day consists of two or three interviews with incredibly smart scientists and engineers on the cutting edge of their fields, who generally offer up mind-blowing tidbits about future areas of research — if you can get them past the 45-minute mark in an interview.

What gear and software do you use, and why?

Some writers work in coffee shops, but to me this is insanity. I am at least twice as productive with an ergonomically-correct setup anchored by a second (very large) monitor. When I’m writing a piece, I might have every interview I conducted for it open at once, plus an outline, notes, a browser full of tabs and the draft I’m working on, plus my email client open on my second (laptop) monitor.

Everything I do is about speed and simplicity:

• I use Chrome because it’s the fastest browser on OS X, as far as I can tell, and also the least crash-prone. I use the AdBlock extension to make it even more stable.
• TextEdit is my word processor of choice. It has no auto-save, but that’s irrelevant, because in years and years of using it every day, it has literally never crashed on me.
• My entire filing and to-do system is accomplished in the Finder, with folders, and is enabled by Spotlight. I throw things in folders, one for each project I’m working on, and I archive them when the piece is done. Everything else is accomplished by my ability to search through my entire drive, including the contents of documents, in an instant.
• I use MailPlane to access Gmail, and Fluid to access Google Calendar. Google’s cloud apps are great, but I need them to be actual, separate applications and not browser tabs so that I can rapidly jump between them using cmd-tab.
• All of my applications are bound to keyboard shortcuts using Spark. I know there are other things out there, like LaunchBar and Quicksilver, and I should probably learn them, but for me it’s enough to be able to launch every app without my hands ever leaving the keyboard.
• Twitter is an invaluable source of breaking news and expertise, and if I’m following you there, it’s because you make me a better and more-informed reporter. I think it is the ultimate tool for journalists, bar none. My Twitter client of choice is Tweetie.
• For fast image editing for blog posts (simple cropping, resizing, etc.) the super-lightweight ImageWell has replaced Photoshop for me.
• Pages is a great substitute for (crash-prone, relatively expensive) Microsoft Word. Many editors love using commenting and track changes in Word and as far as I know, Pages is the only non-Word app that handles both of these perfectly.
• Instapaper is the only way I ever read anything on the web that’s longer than about 600 words, and it saves me from being distracted during the workday, because anything interesting just gets dumped in my Instapaper queue with a single click. Most of my Instapaper reading is done on an iPhone, which works surprisingly well considering the small screen.
• For collecting story ideas and research on larger pieces, I use Delicious.
• For backup, I use Time Machine on an external drive, CrashPlan for remote backup, and I also have my “work” folder automatically backing up to Dropbox. You never know.
• I use Growl alerts to allow me to scan the subject line and first few sentences of incoming emails without having to click over to my email client – especially useful if I don’t want to be interrupted.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

After I read some of the recent research about how awful multitasking is for productivity, I started a practice I call “mono-tasking.” (Ed: also check out our posts on singletasking here) It’s simple: If I’m working on something and I get to a natural break point or something pops up to distract me, I deliberately ignore it and instead focus on finishing the task at hand. Even if it’s something that could easily be left for later, I’ve come to realize that the time required to later on re-ascertain where I was in the middle of a task, plus the costs of mentally switching from one task to another, are just too great.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Who are you and what do you do?

My name’s Paramvir Singh, and I’m a President’s National Award-winning cinematographer, shooting commercials and movies in Mumbai. I am also the founder of DesiCreative, which is a community of “unlike-minded advertising professionals.” DesiCreative has grown from when I started it and takes up a good 5-6 hours of my time each day. I also run FTIIPeople, which is a small community I created for my film school, and am part of the founding team of HoldingWilley, a cricket site.

What’s a typical day like for you?

Simon: Can you briefly outline Opera’s stance on open standards?

Lawson: Of all the browsers currently available, Opera has been around the longest, and has always supported open standards. Note I don’t mean open source; although there are overlaps between the two movements, they’re not the same. You could make an open-source Photoshop clone, for example, but as the Photoshop data format PSD isn’t an open standard, so you couldn’t use it in your clone. We believe that if data is transferred in open, royalty-free formats then it is more future-proof and more manipulable than data that is held in proprietary formats. You’re also protected against being locked into one company’s products — if you don’t like us tomorrow, you can change. I have university essays in a proprietary Tasword format that I can’t open any more as the format was tied to one program, which is now discontinued.

And we put our money where our mouth is: Out of 600 employees, about 25 devote most of their time working on actually making the standards — both the “sexy” standards like HTML5, CSS (our CTO Håkon Wium Lie was co-creator of CSS), SVG, geolocation and widgets, and also the “industry standards” that drive the TV and mobile applications industry, such as CE-HTML, JIL and BONDI.

Simon: The web designers and developers in the WebWorkerDaily audience should all be aware of the benefits of open standards as they use them daily in their work, but why are they important for everyone else? If I’m, say, a copywriter or a lawyer, why should I care?

Lawson: Apart from the future-proofing aspect I explained before, you also have the advantage of portability. An HTML document, for example, will open just about anywhere — PC, Mac, Linux, mobile devices, netbooks etc. Documents authored to W3C standards can work with all the world’s languages, and can be run on mobile devices, TVs and even the much-vaunted web-enabled fridge. There’s also the question of accessibility. Open web standards developed by the W3C have to go through a process to ensure they are accessible — that is, the information contained in documents developed according to the standard can be made available to people with disabilities so, for example, a blind person can hear a description of an image, or a person who can’t use a mouse can navigate a web page using only the keyboard. That accessibility isn’t automatic — the developer has to be professional and take care to use the language correctly — but there is nothing inherently blocking that accessibility. It seems to me that a copywriter would want her purple prose to be available to as many people as possible, and the lawyer would know that in many jurisdictions it’s illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities.

Simon: Opera has been championing support for standards for some time now. Was the decision to support open standards primarily an ideological one, or a commercial one?

Lawson: Both. Our customers (for our embedded browsers, our mobile browsers, etc.) require us to adhere to industry standards, so if we don’t then we don’t get the business. Open standards, as I explained before, ensure the widest possible reach, so it’s sensible to champion them and support them.

Fundamentally (and here’s the ideology) we believe that you should be able to reach any website from any device: a desktop, a phone, an in-car browser, a digital picture frame. It won’t necessarily look exactly the same everywhere (in fact, it shouldn’t — a web page might be easier to read if reformatted to fit a mobile phone screen, for example), but you should be able to access it and interact with it.

Simon: It seems to me that open standards take a long time to develop, due to the amount of wrangling it takes to get agreement from all interested parties in reaching the most acceptable solution. Do you think that open standards hinder or slow the pace of browser innovation (and the web, generally)?

Lawson: It does take a long time to develop open standards. But that standardization process pays off very quickly. Developing a typical web page now is much quicker if you do it to those standards than it was during the dark days of the last Browser War, when you had to develop parallel code bases for IE and Netscape, or choose one of them and lock out people who used the other browser.

As to whether open standards slow the development of the browser — that could be true, if we were selfish. If, for example, you wanted to include some new feature in a browser it is indeed much faster just to develop it and add it in, rather than wait for it to be standardized. But that definitely inhibits the development of the open, interoperable web, and for us that’s much, much more important.

In fact, open standards can speed up browser development. Take, for example, XMLHttpRequest — XHR — the technology that powers Ajax-driven websites that feel as responsive as desktop apps. It was invented by Microsoft. Every other browser vendor saw the value of this technology and spent countless man-hours reverse engineering it to get into their browsers. Now, XHR has been standardized. Any new browser vendor wishing to implement XHR just picks up the spec and implements it, with no need for all that reverse engineering. And because the specification is well-written (disclosure: it was edited by Anne van Kesteren, a colleague of mine at Opera) it can be implemented in a way that is interoperable with existing browsers and websites. Everybody wins.

Simon: There’s new browser war raging at the moment — the major vendors all have pretty good products. Competition in the market is fierce, and seems to be being waged on three fronts: features, speed and standards. What future developments are you looking forward to the most?

Lawson: Personally, I’m excited about HTML5 (so excited, in fact, I’m writing a book about it). HTML is the language that the web
is based on, and it hasn’t been overhauled in a decade. The new version — which already has great support in modern browsers — allows websites to
be even more like desktop applications, encompassing on-the-fly image generation, native video and audio, data storage in the browser and offline applications. Consumers might not know there’s a whole new evolution under the hood, but they will notice new robustness, interoperability and things “just working” — no more messages to download and install new plugins.

Widgets are very exciting, too. You can write an app that behaves like a native app, has access to the file system but is written using web standards, so
can be run on any smartphone with a widget manager (see more at widgets.opera.com)

What browser developments are you looking forward to the most?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Photo by stock.xchng user beuford00

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Sharon Hurley Hall and I’m a location-independent web content writer and blogger. I’ve worked from a number of places, but am currently based in Barbados.

What’s a typical day like for you?

I’m usually up by 6:15 in the morning so I can do a quick email check before breakfast. Then I work pretty steadily till about 3 p.m., with a half-hour break for lunch. On a given day I might be working on writing blog posts, putting together a newsletter, crafting articles — any form of writing, really. I mostly do creative work in the morning, as that’s when my brain works best, and leave other tasks, such as proofreading, for the afternoons. One of the ways I motivate myself is by posting my goals for the day on Twitter. I know lots of other people who do this, too, and we help to keep each other motivated.

What gear and software do you use, and why?

I couldn’t live without Google Apps. I like to keep things in the cloud so that I have access wherever I go, so I run my email and calendar through Google Apps, keep an iGoogle home page with tabs and links for essential sites and back up essential documents into Google Docs. I also use Syncplicity to automate my backups. I love that tool because I can access the files on my desktop from anywhere in the world. I also keep a portable hard drive to which I back up everything once a week, because I’m paranoid about losing data and client files. My other must-have tool is Remember the Milk, for my to-do list. And of course I use Twitter to connect with other writers and bloggers. Skype is essential for doing interviews, though I tend to use Google Talk for IM chats. I also love my Samsung N110 netbook for when I travel, and have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software to boost my productivity.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

The best way to be productive is to play to your strengths. Do creative work when you are creative and you will achieve twice as much as when you work through a slump.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Who are you and what do you do?

My name’s Stephanie Grayson and I’m a corporate communications professional based in New York. The path I’ve traveled to get here has not been typical: I’m a speech trainer turned corporate communications professional turned social media enthusiast. Lately, when I go to conferences, people are often more likely to know me by my Twitter handle (@Critiques4Geeks). My Twitter username came about because I often do speech and media training for C-suite executives and entrepreneurs, many of whom are thought leaders in industries considered “geeky” (I say this with respect, as I consider myself a geek too!)

What’s a typical day like for you?

One of the things I love about corporate communications work is that there isn’t really “a typical day.” The one common thread is that whatever I’m working on has an end goal of helping business folks communicate with their intended audience in a clear, concise and compelling way, whether it’s online or offline communications. On any given day, I might be prepping an executive for his/her upcoming radio interview/public appearance, or I might be instructing a training for a group of entrepreneurs about using Twitter for business communication. It really varies.

What gear and software do you use, and why?

I don’t really have any fancy gear. I’m very “social,” so I do frequently tweet/update/post on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn via both my laptop and my mobile. I can also often be found watching video on YouTube and reading and commenting on blogs.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

My favorite web working tip is: Find your balance. In today’s tech-savvy world, people can (and often do!) reach you anytime, anyplace, anywhere, but this provides a real challenge to work-life balance. Always designate (at least) one period of time per day to “unplug” both literally and figuratively. For me, that time is often dinnertime. Luckily, my family and friends are interesting enough to reliably provide sparkling, electronics-free conversation.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Here’s my video interview with Marc Gingras, CEO of Tungle.me, a scheduling service.

There are a few more video interviews from SXSW that we’ll be publishing next week to round out this year’s SXSW video interview series, so stay tuned.

What is your favorite web app so far this year?

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Robert Hacker and I’m a financial consultant that develops growth strategies and arranges capital for clients, principally in the U.S., the Caribbean and Latin America. I blog at Sophisticated Finance where I discuss the interrelationship between strategy, finance and technology. Entrepreneurship is also a frequent theme.

I am an adjunct professor in entrepreneurship at Florida International University in Miami and a member of the board of the Pino Center of Entrepreneurship. I am also the CFO of the One Laptop Per Child Association, Nicholas Negroponte’s project to provide a free laptop to every child in the developing world.

I’m currently seeking a publisher for my first book on business models for growth companies, which reflects some of my experiences in building a $1 billion company in Indonesia. I’m also planning a second book on social entrepreneurship, inspired in part by my time at OLPC.

What’s a typical day like for you?

My day starts at 4-5 a.m. with a check of the overnight emails. If time permits I write blog posts until 7 a.m., when I head to the gym for an hour. The rest of the morning I am usually at a client’s. I try to devote afternoons to meetings with entrepreneurs, prospects, students or writing. One day each week is devoted to book writing or speaking engagements on entrepreneurship, finance and strategy.

What gear and software do you use, and why?

My principal machine is a 15” MacBook Pro. I have three additional paid applications that I use — LaunchBar, Rocketbox and MS Office. LaunchBar is one of the best productivity apps I’ve seen, and Rocketbox is a fantastic email search tool. MS Office runs better on Apple than it ever did in my pre-Mac period.

My second machine is the new OLPC XO 1.5, which I use for OLPC presentations. This XO has a VIA C7-M processor with 1 GB of RAM and 4GB of NAND memory. The operating system is the Fedora 11 version of Linux with the Sugar educational user interface. I run OpenOffice Presentation as a Sugar activity when I present for OLPC. This machine constantly makes me realize that we have over-engineered our laptops.

My additional IT infrastructure includes a BlackBerry 8830 World Phone, a Verizon wireless modem, Skype and Twitter. I use both AirSet and DropBox for backup, after a previous vendor messed up a new version of their service. I use Google Reader for RSS subscriptions, but am constantly looking for something better.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

1. Learn keyboard shortcuts to work faster
2. Use Google search as a spell checker; it’s faster than most dictionary apps

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Here’s my video interview with Corvida Raven, founder of SheGeeks.net.

What’s your favororite app, Corvida Raven? from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for the rest of the video interviews from SXSW.

What is your favorite web app so far this year?

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Here’s my video interview with Darren Rowse of Problogger fame. Rowse was one of the unlucky presenters whose lecture was interrupted by a convention center-wide fire alarm. But he was able to present long enough to reveal that his real “claim to fame” and his largest web site is the Digital Photography School; he considers Problogger to be his “side project.” Quite the large side project!

Stay tuned for the rest of the video interviews from SXSW.

What is your favorite web app so far this year?

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Maurice Cherry, and I’m the founder of the Black Weblog Awards, the web’s premier Internet event celebrating Black bloggers since 2005. I am also the creative principal at 3eighteen media, an online media company that handles theme design, email marketing and design, copywriting, copyediting and social media consulting. In this role, I am currently doing some consulting for the Henry W. Grady Health System Foundation, which funds Grady Memorial Hospital, one of the largest health systems in the country. When time permits, I also do some freelance writing on technology for Black Web 2.0 and TechDrawl.

I always start my day with a fresh pot of tea and go through my email and my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader. After that, depending on the day, there’s meetings with clients around town, working on client projects at home or collaborating with other creatives on projects around the city. Oftentimes, you can find me at a Starbucks or at Octane Coffee working feverishly on a new article or on proposals, or coding and designing a new web site.

My portable gear is pretty minimal: I have a Gateway T-Series laptop (aka “Deanna Blu”) with a 320GB external HDD and a Logitech Trackman Marble (I’ve always used trackball mice). My home office has an HP Slimline PC running Windows 7 Ultimate connected to a 24″ LCD monitor. Also, I have a T-Mobile G1, which pretty much never leaves my side and sometimes serves as a 3G modem in spots where I have my laptop and there’s no Wi-Fi.

On the software end, the tools that help me be great are few. I use Freshbooks for invoices and client management, Dropbox for synchronizing files between my two machines and phone (as well as between me and my clients), Belvedere for elegant file management between my machines and my external HDDs (two 1 TB drives) and Thunderbird 3 for mail (tricked out with a few different plugins and filters). I also use Google Calendar and Google Tasks a lot since the updates sync to my phone and my mail client effortlessly. I’m still pretty old school on project management, though — I use Microsoft Project, a Moleskine and a Marvy Uchida LePen.

I have three tips, actually.

1. Get a change of scenery from time to time. Working from home can be great, but explore coffeehouses, restaurants and coworking spaces to give you a change of pace.
2. Realize that occasionally you have to meet your clients where they are. Sometimes, that means they’re not going to be as technically savvy as you are. You can either spend time getting them to your level, or you can slide tackle (à la Nathan Smith) and just get the job done.
3. Track everything. Track your web stats, your finances, your project timeline — track everything you can. It’s the best way to see when you’re making progress.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

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Stay tuned for more video interviews from SXSW.

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For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution