Web Worker Daily |
| Posted: 12 Aug 2008 04:00 PM CDT
For the return trip, the recipient can email you back at your akapost address, and it will get forwarded back. A free account lets you have one alias and one address; paid plans add additional names and even the ability to use akapost with your own domain name.           |
| Posted: 12 Aug 2008 01:00 PM CDT Like many another independent web worker, I’m a jack of all (or at least many) trades. Putting together a career on the web often involves pulling together disparate skills to keep customers happy and keep bread on the table. The problem is that unless you’re very lucky, not everything you do for your web working job is going to be something you love. Don’t get me wrong - on the whole, I thrive on web work, and I’ll never willingly go back to an office. But my morning, for instance, was entirely devoted to configuring an Apache server for a client - something I detest doing. Still, happy clients mean doing more work I love, so it’s worth putting up with. What about you? What part of your web work job would you just as soon never see cross your virtual desk again? Do you have a strategy for doing less of it? Let us know!           |
| GroupSwim Facilitates Smarter Collaboration Posted: 12 Aug 2008 11:00 AM CDT
While one of the company’s tag lines is “social collaboration for the enterprise,” I always look at software and apps from the standpoint of the lone Web worker who puts together various virtual teams for projects. Can GroupSwim be useful to distributed Web workers? From the demo I saw of GroupSwim, the first thing that came to mind was a “smart” tool. GroupSwim uses “semantic technology” to create relevance and linkages between information and people on teams for any given project. Some aspects of this technology include: 1. Autotags - While the app will present possible tags for messages and other content submitted to each group site, you can also train the app to key in on important terms. This improves labeling and searching for relevant content down the road. 2. Focus - By providing greater relevance, search results within the group’s correspondence and work is more focused. The system even extrapolates the most popular content based on what has been read, replied to, and monitored. 3. Inferred Expertise - The system identifies individuals on a team who may have an expertise on particular topics based on their communications and responses to their communications from other team members. If you need to know who on the tream really understands social media, the system could point the way. 4. Related Information - Based on content entered including tags, the system recommends other content within a group’s interactions that may be relevant or related. At this time, related content is not pulled from the Web but this may be a future feature. 5. Instant Discovery - This is the “smart” search engine that evolves as the grup evolves and uses more tags. Tags appear in a tag cloud to also point out “hot” topics.
GroupSwim offers role-based permissions for team members and your group types can be public, private, auto-join or custom. The company is rolling out a wiki feature in September that will be WYSIWIG and add another collaborative dimension to the application. All forum discussions, file feedback, and eventually wiki content can be received by team members either through an RSS feed or via email notification. The tool offers various views and ways to access or break down content and discussions to zero in on exactly the information you need. You can sort by topic popularity or at a glance determine what topics are more popular based on a green bubble demonstrating the greatest activity.
Another upcoming feature will be integrated tasks although the company says they still are not looking to compete with the Basecamps of the world. While all of the features of GroupSwim could potentially help a Web worker collaborate on multiple projects with far-flung teams, the pricing of the application leaves individual Web workers in the dust. At minimum monthly fee of $150, I personally won’t even consider a tool like this, no matter how smartly it operates. Right now, I spend $24 for Freshbooks to manage my invoicing and $24 for Basecamp where I get a sufficient amount of organization and collaboration for my needs. But if you really like the features of GroupSwim and think you might want to use it as a Web worker with a distributed team, contact the company and give them your feedback. Their pricing model is still new, and they seem willing to consider an alternate pricing plan for those of us who are non-enterprise level. How can you see an application like GroupSwim fitting into your work process or can you? What other tools are you using for collaboration with your virtual team versus project management?           |
| Twitter, Limits, and Transparency Posted: 12 Aug 2008 10:00 AM CDT It’s been widely reported in the last 24 hours or so that Twitter has imposed limits on following behavior - though some reports have gotten a bit confused. As laid out on our parent blog GigaOM, Twitter is currently limiting the number of people that you can follow (not the number of people that can follow you). The official Twitter Blog mentions this as part of their work to limit spam on the service - which work has been quite successful. So the alarm that went up over not being able to use Twitter as a broadcast service to large numbers of followers seems to be unfounded. Nevertheless, there’s something troubling here. Though the blog post says there’s no magic number, quite a few Twitterers - including some heavy participants - report hitting the limit at 2000. Some have been trying to get the attention of Twitter management to discuss this for days, with little or no result. It’s reminiscent of Twitter’s attitude towards making money from the service, which amounts to “we have a plan, but we won’t tell you,” or to fixing issues, which seems to be “we’re working on it, leave us alone.” In a world of Web 2.0 openness, Twitter seems to be carrying traditional business values of secrecy a bit further than most.           |
| Posted: 12 Aug 2008 08:00 AM CDT
Thomas Hawk is regretting his iPhone purchase. Do I feel the same way? Nope. Sure, I have my issues with the phone. But it’s still the most fun I’ve ever had with a cell phone, and I’ve been productive using it. Audio Quality This has been a nice surprise. I knew that listening to music would be great on an iPhone. It’s an iPod, after all. I didn’t realize how good phone calls would sound on an iPhone, particularly through the ear buds.
Reception I’m getting a lot of dropped calls. But I can’t say for certain whether it’s more or less than I was experiencing on my BlackBerry. It think it’s just AT&T. I currently live halfway between Philadelphia and New York City, so I rarely have an issue with 3G signal, although the strength varies wildly, often moment-to-moment. Ease of Use I’m getting better at two-thumbed typing. Still not nearly as fast as I was on the BlackBerry, but it gets the job done. I understand that the iPhone’s simplicity is part of the design appeal. It makes a clean, beautiful demo. However, there are some things that could make the device much easier to actually use. I wish I could bookmark settings screens so I don’t have to keep digging for them. I wish there was a way of sorting icons alphabetically, or by most recent use. I currently have 3 full screens of apps and bookmarks, and try as I do to keep them organized by category, that doesn’t always stick. I’m spending too much time scrolling back and forth between screens trying to remember where a certain app icon is. I wish there were more shortcuts. Double pressing the home button launches iPod controls if the iPod is running, the Favorites screen if it’s not. How about letting us define for ourselves what happens on double press? How about letting us program a favorite app to launch on 3 presses? How about speed dialing? Too many taps to find a contact and call them. App Store It takes a great deal of discipline to budget app purchases. Way too easy to click the “buy” button, and those purchases add up quickly. Some of my favorites that I’m regularly using:
Some disappointments:
Battery I feared this would be a issue, and it was. I have data fetching set to hourly, brightness dialed down, and wifi on request only, yet the best I can get is around 4-6 hours of active use. This includes the time using the phone as an iPod, which is where I often run into problems. A few weeks ago I was on a business trip to South San Francisco. I unplugged the fully charged phone from my MacBook Pro at around 2 pm and headed to the city to walk around and meet friends for dinner. While on the BART, I read a few chapters in a novel, played some solitaire and checked my email. I listened to podcasts and music while walking around the city and used GPS now and then to make sure I walking in the right direction. I should have paid more attention to the battery than I did. I knew I had to make a phone call from the station to get a ride back to the hotel at the end of the evening, and by 6 pm I was seeing the red low battery indicator. Thankfully, my dinner companion had his MacBook and an iPod sync cable with him, so while we ate, my iPhone was getting precious juice from his computer under the table. For a phone that you use only to make phone calls and send text messages, 4 hours of active usage in between charges is plenty. For a device that is used as often and in as many ways as an iPhone is, the battery charge is never enough. Nowadays, I charge my phone whenever I’m in my car, that helps. I also carry the Kensington Mini Battery Pack with me in my purse. Fully charged, it gives back about 70% of the iPhone’s battery life. I picked this one over other options such as the Richard Solo device because of its small size. I haven’t had a concern with the battery since that trip to San Francisco. Conclusion I bought the iPhone for many reasons, the most significant being the browser. I am not disappointed. Most websites just work with the iPhone, even if navigation can be awkward at times. As Apple works out some of the software kinks, the experience will only get better.           |
| OperaTor Anonymous Browsing: Interesting, but Not Speedy Posted: 11 Aug 2008 06:00 PM CDT Do you ever need to surf the web anonymously? Do you like to keep useful applications on a USB thumb drive? If so, look into OperaTor, a free download that delivers a portable version of the Opera browser incorporating Tor (an anonymity network that keeps your traffic protected through proxies). As the folks over on Download Squad note, it slows your browsing down, but that’s also exactly how you can tell that it’s doing its job–keeping your surfing anonymous via proxies. I’ve loaded OperaTor on a USB thumb drive and on a PC (it is for Windows only at the moment). It only has a 7MB footprint, making it ideal for a USB flash drive, and if you’re particular about keeping, say, your public online sessions anonymous, OperaTor in conjunction with VPN (virtual private network) software should do the trick. The Tor network is explained here. Many people use it to keep their Internet surfing anonymous, especially people in overseas countries where seemingly innocuous moves on the web can land you in jail. Tor uses a series of three proxy servers, which provide their own identifying information as you surf–shielding you from being identified. OperaTor anonymizes the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. As soon as you visit a few pages on the web that you’re used to loading, you’ll feel how the proxy servers are indeed being pinged because the pages will be slow to load. Still, the speeds are not unacceptable, and the underlying Opera browser is known for being fast. I could easily see using OperaTor for short bursts of web work when I want to be anonymous. There are some guidelines posted if you’re interested in how anonymous you can be with OperaTor. Use of JavaScript, chat clients and other standard features in Opera can begin to expose your sessions. However, if you use VPN software in conjunction with OperaTor, I doubt if you’ll run much risk at all. OperaTor may especially be of interest to bloggers and web workers in countries with restrictive Internet policies. Existing, similar tools based on proxies, such as Anonymizer, have been successfully used in such countries for years to keep web traffic anonymous. I’ve added it to my growing collection of USB thumb drive applications.           |
One month ago today, I waited on a 3-hour line in Edison, NJ to buy my first iPhone. Shortly thereafter, I posted 
I could never get my Bluetooth headset working well and consistently with the iPhone. Too many screens to navigate to get it turned on/off. On the BlackBerry, it took 2 mindless clicks to activate/deactivate Bluetooth. On the iPhone, it’s at least 4 (Settings -> General - Bluetooth -> on/off) and that gets old fast. So I keep the earbuds plugged in at all times, managing the cord tangles with a 
My favorite productivity app is Appigo’s 
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