The study tracked 21,000 full-time employees in Sweden aged between 18 and 65, comparing their health and asking about their method of commuting and sleep and stress levels, as well as tracking how many days they missed work. The results indicate that taking a car, train or bus to the office is likely to negatively impact your health.

“Generally car and public transport users suffered more everyday stress, poorer sleep quality, exhaustion and, on a seven point scale, felt that they struggled with their health compared to the active commuters,” like cyclists, said Researcher Erik Hansson. The longer the commute, the worse the effects.

ABC News spoke to Dr. Redford Williams, professor of medicine at Duke University about the findings. He argued that while sitting in your car is not an inherently healthy activity, the actual problem with commuting may be as much the lack of control we have over the experience as the hours of inactivity:

We know that people who have a lot of demands and very little control over how they meet those demands are at a higher risk for negative health effects. And when you’re relying on a train to get to work, it’s totally out of your control most of the time.

This is entirely in line with existing science we’ve covered previously on WWD, which shows lack of autonomy is linked to higher stress, which, in turn, correlates with worse health. Flexible and self-directed, new ways of working that are web enabled and location independent, boost autonomy and so should also boost health.

And if you’re still on the fence about approaching your boss about ditching your commute, the grim math about how much your commute is daily journey is costing you might spur your courage and get you into her office.

At Net:Work, we’ll explore the benefits — and challenges — of an increasingly mobile workforce. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ben Woosley.

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The SWC has been conceived as an experiment in using computing technology to address climate change, reducing travel costs and carbon footprints by providing workers with the ability to work remotely away from the City. Cisco, driven by its commitments to the Clinton Global Initiative has also taken the opportunity to introduce some of its leading edge conferencing and collaboration technologies in the SWC.

Designed for individual workers or collaborative groups, the SWC not only offers meeting rooms and deskspace, but lounge areas, childcare, catering, some financial services and is apparently located close to public transport amenities. Currently, the residents include city employees themselves, but the hope is to broaden this group to include local businesses and freelancers.

Here’s a quick video excerpt from a piece on the launch of the SWC…

Amsterdam’s city administration is planning the launch of several more SWCs around the city, over the coming months – each with a different industrial partner – and is looking to experiment in collaborating with countries like India to understand whether this style of working can suit global collaboration.

The SWC is a departure from the coworking culture that we’ve been covering of late at WWD, but as we’ve speculated about the possibility of coworking spaces as a means to address commuting issues, a vehicle for civic regeneration and even childcare solutions, it’s gratifying to see public-private collaborations, such as the SWC, that address each of these areas in an attempt to experiment with new modes of working and living.

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The writer argues that though technology and infrastructure has long been available, only now are the economic and commercial drivers unfolding that’s making teleworking an attractive default position for many employers, not just employees.

Here’s a few key items from the piece…

• the writer would spent over an hour each day during the 70s commuting to a place of employment; he estimates that telecommuting from the mid-80s onwards has reduced his carbon footprint by over 60 tonnes.
• Gartner Dataquest estimates that 25% of US employees worked from home, at least once a week in 2007. European levels seems to be comparatively higher.
• Another study estimates that 33m Americans are employed in roles sutable for telecommuting; removing these commuters from daily travels could drive down oil imports by 25% and reduce carbon emissions dramatically….with the added benefit of increased productivity and perhaps even vacation time.
• Employers are beginning to understand that increased agility, reduced costs and enhanced business continuity can flow from encouraging telecommuting, actually strengthening a business’ competitiveness and resilience whilst removing large capital and operational costs from the bottom line.
• Studies of remote workers at American Express and BT show that they can be 30-40% more productive.
• A separate study concludes that remote workers can suffer from career stagnation and isolation, but ironically suggests that richer, ambient and persistent communication channels are the solution.

There seems to be a perfect storm brewing – of technological innovation, improved competitiveness, soaring fuel costs and a desire to tackle climate change – that might push telecommuting and remote working into the default pattern of work for most employers.

As the commercial and technological environment matures, perhaps the focus for telcommuting now needs to explore the neccessary cultural, social and civic infrastructure neccessary to take advantage of this perfect storm…

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An unexpectedly successful, non-studio affiliated show starring All My Children actress Eden Reigel as a lonely-slash-possibly schizo girl who conjures imaginary friends, Imaginary Bitches has been racking up the views lately: At least one episode has been viewed over 1 million times, and several other episodes have view counts in the high six figures.

Ostensibly, the show’s popularity is derived from Reigel’s star power, plus cameos from other soap actors such as Jessalyn Gilsig, Greg Rikaart and Elisabeth Hendrickson. The boldface names have prompted coverage in pubs including NYPost.com, US Weekly and TVGuide.com, and the series was recently featured on YouTube’s home page.

But despite these bona fides, at least one anonymous IB detractor — a tipster who wrote a detailed account of his suspicions to NTV — accused IB of using fake MySpace profiles, MySpace spamming and YouTube’s autoplay embeds to generates tens of thousands of fake views.

Pointing to the inbound links on each IB vid on YouTube, our tipster noted the high number of views coming from suspicious MySpace profiles. For example, Episode 1 links include 4,463 views from Pam/Jenna (a fake Office profile). Episode 7 links include 18,938 views from Leona Lewis (a UK pop artist). There are several more examples, with each MySpace profile showing the video in the comments field, never embedded by the actual profile owner. Sometimes the videos appear in comments far removed from the profile’s front page.

Andrew Miller, the series creator and writer, denies any wrongdoing.

“We stopped doing that,” he said, referring to the practice of distributing embedded videos in comments. “There are sites out there that say they guarantee a certain number of views or plays or whatever, but honestly, I can’t afford that. And when you do it that way, I don’t think it even counts.”

A YouTube spokesperson said that autoplaybacks are not counted toward the visible “views” numbers displayed on YouTube because those playbacks are not viewer initiated.

Miller said that he and Reigel spent hours promoting the show to MySpace bloggers, and asked Reigel’s enthusiastic fan base to help out. Every time a show premieres, he said, they send the video to their MySpace contacts. “It’s our fans who have done the bulk of the work. They pass the episodes along, they blog about them, they comment, they message board, create avatars and write to other bloggers…Without an Eisner-type marketing budget, episode sharing is the best way we know to find an audience.”

Miller is currently finishing post-production work on IB’s first season. “We haven’t made any money, and this is all out of pocket expenses,” he said, adding that he’s been shopping around the series to several sites. He attributes the show’s success to his wife’s fans, the show’s content and help from friends. “We’ve gotten by on favors from friends, really.”

In fact, he added, “We’re about to start work on season two, and I’m just about out of favors.”

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Following the success of London’s congestion charge, launched in 2003, other UK cities such as Leeds, Cardiff, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol have begun to explore similar schemes. The UK government approved a congestion charging programme for Manchester – the country’s defacto second city – which would charge inbound morning commuters the equivalent of $4-6 and outbound evening commuters around $2. I guess that’s around a gallon of fuel each day by US standards!

The rising cost of fuel globally coupled with the UK’s antiquated public transport infrastructure could mean that the vibrant urban core of Manchester – undergoing somewhat of a renaissance – could begin to diffuse as commuters opt to exercise their option to work-from-home.

But this isn’t a bad thing for Manchester – the city has a great infrastructure, a large media industry (including Google UK’s second office and BBC’s New Media arm) and is becoming an emerging hub for the digital industries.

However, there’s a signal here that civic planners, creative/ digital employers and local government need to think more creatively about urban design. Web Workers can be at the leading edge of such a debate, already adopting to new realities such as remote tools, social media and coworking as replacements and alternatives for traditional commuting and office life.

Can we see traditional centralized employers diffusing across large metropolitan area? After all, kids don’t all go to a central ‘school district’ or doctors to a ‘healthcare district’, why do we expect large and small corporations to behave this way?

It’s not difficult to envisage a city such as Manchester populated by hundreds of coworking spaces with large employers such as the BBC, Google and others sharing these spaces, integrating schools, childcare and public transport hubs…oh wait, that’s suburbia!

Seriously, there’s a role for the readers of this blog to play in shaping the urban future of the cities we live in as sustainable living becomes increasingly important to urban life. How can this community start shaping this debate and bring its experiences to the table for other sectors?

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Moderator:Gregg Spiridellis, JibJab

Speakers: Lisa Donovan, LisaNova; Douglas Cheney, Big Fantastic; Kevin Cohen, Turner Broadcasting System; Ty Ahmad-Taylor, MTV; Gary Wang, Todou

Introducing Spiridellis, who, is introducing the panel, and asking them to introduce themselves and ask them for the epiphany moment. For Spiridellis it was a “dancing dootie.”

LisaNova discovering YouTube was a seminal moment, people were communicating. She was more interested in film. Put a video up and it took off, and the fan base just kept growing, 75,000 subscribers. Consistently 500,000 plays.

What about YouTube did you like?

LISA: It was the instant feedback. We were able to just do something creative and immediately put it out there. So used to having people tell them what to do. It was amazing to communicate with subscriber base.

DOUG: In 2005 working on a doc he was distributing, stumbled across YouTube and was blown away. Bridging that gap between creator and user. This really seemed like the most prolifiic way to to that. Put together a team of filmmakers and make Sam Has Seven Friends. 80 episodes (90 seconds each). That secured representation at UTA. Through UTA met with Eisner’s Vuguru, pitched Prom Queen. They liked his enthusiasm.

TY: He runs prod dev for MTV properties. Was working at the New York Times, read about Shockwave. Decided he wanted to do it instead of writing about it. In terms of what we’re doing, the core assets are music videos and TV shows, since we only have one scripted drama still in production despite strike. Looking to create efficiencies in regards to socialization.

GARY: Online distribution platform with both preimum and UGC in China. Was working for another company, and was sent to China to try and bring European content to China. Born out of frustration because Chinese govt runs the TV stations. Back in 2004 a friend told him about podcasts. And he thought this was interesting. Site went live in April 2005. This was his first venture ever. Says you don’t have to pay people a lot of money (especially in China). He wrote most of the code. They raised a round, gone through three rounds of funding. Month uniques of about a million in China. They account for 54 percent of the market.

KEVIN: Been with TBS for 12 years, CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim. First time he knew he wanted to be a part of this space was in 1994 with the Mosaic browser and clicking on his first hyperlink. CNN is today the largest news site, 31 million uniques online, passed the 1 billion usage minutes-mark. Despite explosion of data, TV viewing is still at its highest point.

GREGG: What is the tangible moment about success? This Land had 130,000 people on newsletter, when This Land launched did million streams a day.

LISA: Felt that way every moment, first video out, 30,000 people watched in one day. When you hit a million views that’s another succes. They’re all moments of success. It’s unbelievable until it became normal.

GREGG: She went from YouTube to MADTV. How did that happen?

LISA: Casting director saw Teeny-Weeny and gave her a call. There was no middleman, you can put something out there and you’re cast on a TV show It’s just access to the world.

DOUG: Commenting that his partner never ate his pants despite promises he would if they met with Eisner. Prom Queen’s success was when core audience broke off to start their own forums because so popular.

TY: First arrived, it was a Flash site, it wasn’t SEO optimized, too a long time to load, didn’t have standard ad units. Ads would overtake nav. Created HTML version of the site, performed spectacularly. For VMAs, performed well, delivered more streams (Britney!).

GARY: Had many top videos, for him success was that he gave a speech and a university in China, asked a room full of students, asked how many were users, 95 percent raised their hands. Has best of Todou show on three TV networks in China.

Success in terms of monetization?

GARY: Yes. No diffrence between TV and PC and mobile soon. Hopefully will take the site public.

GREGG: Many different ways to measure success, reach, brand, etc.

KEVIN: Broadband sites averaging over 20 million uniques a month, but monetizing important. Focused on the mobile space. CNN is the largest mobile destination as well. The key is that we aren’t just taking TV content and throwing it online. Putting content that is suitable for the platform.

GREGG: Investment in original programming for the medium? Deficit financing?

KEVIN: When we started, we were investing in the infrastructure, but also approaching on-air brands. The way we organize, 85 percent of sales are integrated sales across platforms. Been very successful. SuperDeluxe? What you’re seeing is that it’s a challenge to launch a new cable network, unless you want to write a billion-dollar check, or are a cable provider. No barriers in the online space. Launched SuperDeluxe, going after younger talent in Hollywood. People who have proven themseleves in the. Trying to create content suitable for that audience.

GREGG: Ty, you have access to so much programming and Facebook, platform as programming. How you see what impact that has on distribution.

TY: Gap between internal metrics and comScore. Our target demo doesn’t respond to comScore surveys. You need a number of eyeballs watching videos. in our case, most of our customers are already on MySpace and Facebook, there’s still a perception that we’re not showing videos, but that’s because people switch off. First Facebook app is watching videos, any video in the catalog. Get the videos to your friends. Fairly simple, search play and send to friends. You can follow people in your social graph to see what they’ve been watching. Looking to roll this out to other properties on a niche basis. See a Hills application or Trick My Truck.

GREGG: Kevin, how do you look at destination/syndication and avoid conflicts?

KEVIN: One of the biggest hurdles is competitive sales teams. Distribution partners might allow run of site while someone else selling against a particular brand. There are ways of working around that. Embeddable players, a particular site can pull a particular clip, coming back to us and we can control the advertising. We have RSS feeds, and other initiaives, like the Second Life i-report in Second Life. We’re being proactive in going out to the super syndication space.

TY: It’s a mistake to think that we’re going to be gatekeepers. The current windowing strategy doesn’t serve anyone’s interest. Important to us to be where our customers can find us.

GREGG: Bigger companies want to hold on to what they have as opposed to going after new groudn.

TY: People who never come to your site, people come once a month, once a week, and addicts, every day. Most of our customers come once a month. Makes bad economic sense to have a store if users can’t get to it.

GREGG: Gary, talk a little about dealing with copyrighted material in China.

GARY: It’s complicated issue, never easy. Few things make it easier in China for distributors, first content owners are not major media companies, they are scattered about, 50 major TV stations and all government owned. The most compelling thing for them is not generate revenue, but build up influence. For some reason, American content doesn’t even make up 1 percent of content viewed on his site. Asian content producers are more open-minded. Huge pirated DVD market, and no syndication, shows are free once broadcast on TV channels. We are an online distribution channel. So the content is always there for users. Very simple rev share.

KEVIN: On Piracy. A lot of concern, 25,000 Adult Swim clips a day posted to YouTube. YouTube trying to contain that with new systems. On the news site, very focused on UGC, launched I-Report, becoming a compelling source of breaking news.

TY: Plenty people fighting piracy. Quincy at CBS has a smart strategy, make it available everywhere. Led Zeppelin, by not making stuff available is saying ‘Steal it.’ The best antidote is making stuff available.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: How do you get big brands comfortable with UGC programming?

Prom Queen get notes from Brands?

DOUG: Did do product integration, but Vuguru handled most of that, we did it ourselved, tried to work as many Fiji bottles into the frame as much as possible. The requirements were very specific about how long a brand would be on-screen, etc. Can’t just translate feature film prod placement to web because web shows only 2-3 mins.

GARY: pre-rolls has not impacted viewing.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: When do Chinese people watch online video?

GARY: Very similar to USA, lunch break, when closing, 8-11 pm.

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Has anyone else noticed if there pre-order of Leopard has shipped?

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After I moved back to XP I installed FolderShare and set it to sync MyDocuments to the HP p2710p as I had before.  Theinitial setup worked fine and I sat back and waited for the initialsync to run so subsequent syncs would be fast and done in thebackground as usual.  Since I had just rebuilt the P1610 from the HPthere was nothing to copy between them but it needed to catalog bothsystems so any changes to one of the devices would instantly bereflected on the other.   While this cataloging was taking place Istarted thinking about the different document handling between XP &Vista and wondered how FolderShare would handle it.  All of my Windowsdevices I have used with FolderShare successfully were all runningVista so the user document tree was the same on all devices, but nowwith XP involved that tree was different.

On Vista machines the document folder tree is something like this:

UserUsername

…Documents
…Music
…Pictures

On Windows XP the tree looks like this:

documents and settingsusernameMy Documents

The My Music, and My Pictures folders are nested inside the My Documents folder instead of a unique tree under the Username folder so there is a distinct difference in the two trees.  It turns out that FolderShare has given me a problem but not one like I was expecting.  It seems that when FolderShare runs on the Vista machine and tries to create a folder in the Music directory it gets an error that implies there is not sufficient privilege to create it.  The only option at this point is to totally shut FolderShare down ending any ability to sync the devices.  I have corresponded with FolderShare tech support and their only advice was to sync the folders within each Document tree separately to insure the sync will be done correctly and no folder creation needs to be done on the Vista device(s).  In other words, even though Microsoft makes both operating systems and FolderShare, it can’t make FolderShare handle the two OSes properly in a sync situation. 

This surprises me because it’s not complicated to figure out that My DocumentsMy Music should sync to the UsernameMusic folder in Vista.  The tech support team suggested I set all of this up by hand to work properly.  The only problem is that in the Documents tree on Vista and the My Documents tree on XP I have dozens of folders to set up manually and FolderShare won’t let me do it.  The folders are not selectable in the sync setup screen so I can’t do it.  I haven’t gotten anything to work because Vista keeps erroring out trying to create folders under the Music folder on the HP.  I have manually set the folder tree to allow creating folders but it still errors out when FolderShare tries and when I do a property check on the Music folder it says it’s read-only, even after just de-selecting that option.  Vista is protecting me from syncing my files so I’ll have to get a solution to this to make FolderShare work.

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