Web Worker Daily |
| Open Thread: Web Worker Success Stories Posted: 21 Aug 2008 04:30 PM CDT Sometimes it’s all too easy to feel isolated as a web worker. If you’re in an office and do something great for the team, you can expect some pats on the back, or even a celebratory lunch. But if you’re working at home, you can be like that tree that falls in the forest when no one is around, uncertain as to whether anyone even noticed what you did. Well, let’s change that. Your web working peers are here, and they’d be happy to offer encouragement and recognition for your successes. So - what have you done lately on the web working front that was great? Landed new business? Launched a site? Smoothed out a broken process? The floor is open, come out and take a bow.           |
| Company Blogs Can Provide Big Insights Posted: 21 Aug 2008 02:00 PM CDT One of the things I like to do when evaluating an application or service is to also look to see if the company has a product blog, and how frequently it is updated. I have found that regular posting on a blog is a great indicator of a companies general attitude about the importance of communicating with their customers. A good company blog lets us know about new features, gives us tutorials and tips, and presents us with useful information related to their product or service. It gives us a glimpse into what they do and often why they do it. It also makes my experience more personal by giving me names and faces to associate with the company. Some companies really seem to get it. Folks like CrossLoop, BatchBlue, FreshBooks, 37signals, and Wufoo are all excellent at keeping me in the loop via their blog. These regular glimpses into their company and their services enhance the quality of my interaction with them immeasurably. The bigger companies seem to struggle with this a bit. While I subscribe to the various Google product blogs, I find the are updated much less frequently. Meanwhile, our own Judi Sohn has written about the state of blogging at Apple. Microsoft actually has a staggering number of bloggers, although quality and frequency can vary. I highly recommend Geek in Disguise as the best place to start, he’ll point you to the others you need. Steve is quickly becoming the face of Microsoft for me. A well written, frequently updated blog certainly goes a long way to keep me as a customer happy. Does your company have a blog? Which company blogs would you recommend?           |
| Iterasi Adds Mac Support and More Posted: 21 Aug 2008 01:00 PM CDT
The other significant new feature in this release is a scheduler to do periodic captures of a web page to your account (assuming your computer is running). This gives you another way to track changes on sites that don’t provide RSS feeds. Still in beta, Iterasi remains free to download and use.           |
| Posted: 21 Aug 2008 09:00 AM CDT As we’ve recently discussed, telecommuting and web work are becoming more popular. Inevitably, this leads to some backlash from those who prefer to preserve old ways of working. One example: a recent article in Computerworld titled “Get tough on telecommuting: 6 questions to ask before you say yes.” While caution is a good thing, we think there are answers to all of these questions - and we’ll present them here to help you with your own skeptical manager. Computerworld recommends that IT departments in particular should be cautious about agreeing to work-at-home plans proposed by their employees. While they don’t offer a firm recommendation against telecommuting, they do point out some prominent industry failures in this area, and hand out a set of “tough questions” for managers to ask themselves and their employees. While a poorly-structured telecommuting experience serves no one, a smart of motivated potential teleworker should be able to meet all of their objections head-on. 1. Full-time telecommuting can be a smart decision. If staying at home one day saves costs for both employer and employee, then staying at home five days is five times as good. If your job is done primarily via e-mail and telephone, you have those exact same tools at home to work with. Worries about remote employees not being able to keep informal communications open with their coworkers are overblown; with tools like Skype, Twitter, and instant messaging at their fingertips, some telecommuters are actually more a part of the team than those who are trapped in cubicles all day. 2. Deliverables can include time available. If you’re faced with a manager who worries that you’re going to do all your work in three hours and then vanish, you can negotiate “availability” as part of your job description. There’s no reason for a telecommuter to be out of touch, given the multitude of communications media we have available these days. Just as with traditional flexwork arrangements, you can establish core hours during which you’ll guarantee to be easily reachable. This should remove worries about scheduling meetings and taking calls from your coworkers. 3. A better working environment improves creativity. If your manager fears you’ll lose creativity by working at home, it’s simple enough to point out that the less you’re distracted by uncomfortable seating, hemmed in by tiny cubicles, and interrupted by coffee-breaking coworkers, the more chance there is that you’ll actually be able to focus on your work. Often this sort of objection, though, is just a way to say “I don’t think you’ll work if I’m not watching you” without actually saying it. That’s where you can come in with a plan for actually measuring your output - and a willingness to agree that you’ll modify or suspend the experiment if your productivity drops. 4. With the right tools, telework can make collaboration easier. If your team can’t gel to include key teleworkers in collaborative decisions, you’re likely not taking advantage of the many tools that the web has to offer. From videoconferencing to quick IM sessions to shared task lists to specialized tools like shared-session code editors, there are plenty of ways to collaborate even if you’re out of the office. In fact, the added features of these tools can even make collaboration easier than if you depend only on chance water-cooler meetings and formal planning sessions. 5. Teleworkers can do their share. If employees who are “left behind” resent teleworking, it may be just because they don’t see you working. You need to be prepared to take measures to make your work, and your availability, perfectly obvious. A culture of instant messaging is one easy way to ensure this; being across the city and being down the hall are the same if you’re just an IM away. It’s also possible to turn simmering resentment into a plan for teleworking that encompasses all employees that can work remotely, getting your coworkers on your side instead of resenting you. 6. Telecommuters can be team players. If your manager is worried that you won’t come back into the office if it becomes necessary, the easiest thing to do is to point at your past record of being a productive team member. Make it clear that you understand that there may be times when in-office presence is required for a special project or due to an organizational change. At the same time, though, if you’re pressured on this front you may want to think about the larger issues: if your manager doesn’t trust you, do you really want to keep working for them? Finally, remember - you’re not completely devoid of leverage in a negotiation about potential telecommuting. Don’t be afraid to point out to your manager that this is an increasingly-accepted work trend, and that organizations that adopt an anti-telecommuting stance are going to find it increasingly hard to attract and retain the top workers.           |
| Microsoft is Staying its Course on the Search Front Posted: 20 Aug 2008 06:00 PM CDT Microsoft is continuing to maneuver for a greater share of the search market, but does it really stand a chance of winning much share from Google? Officials from Microsoft were in Silicon Valley this week, discussing plans for how to outdo Google, but I doubt if any of the current moves are going to woo web workers away from the search leader. Microsoft is a distant third, behind Google and Yahoo, in the search market, and serves fewer than 10 percent of all Internet searches. With its much-ballyhooed attempt to acquire Yahoo squelched for now, it has turned to other avenues to try to put a competitive strategy together. Will any of the new plans win you over? One of the biggest moves Microsoft has recently made on the search front is acquiring Powerset, which it reportedly spent $100 million on. Powerset gets its semantic search muscle from the open source, cluster-based technology Hadoop. Hadoop underlies much of Yahoo’s search technology. It’s already clear that Microsoft’s LiveSearch is going to embrace clustered search in a big way through Powerset’s technology. I’m guessing that far more natural language searching will become available through this hookup, because natural language searching requires massive processing as matches are iteratively ranked for relevancy. That said, though, natural language searching has yet to become a hit on the web. Have you, as a web worker, historically relied on it? Did you use AskJeeves much when the compahy was focused on natural language searching? Probably not. Still, at the Search Engines Strategies Conference and Expo this week in San Jose, Satya Nadella, senior vice president for search and advertising at Microsoft, said that investments and new deep-search techniques will help the company gain share from Google. The “investments” portion of that two-pronged strategy may be more interesting than the deep-search, and natural language efforts. Microsoft has a mountain of cash, and is already acquiring niche players in search. As just one example of that, in April, Microsoft acquired Farecast, a site that I wrote about here. Farecast is focused on airline travelers. For any ticket you research at the site, Farecast.com produces a chart with more than two months of price history for that ticket. Pricing averages are also reported. It’s a travel search site, and an example of how Microsoft is looking for a leg up in the search competition by eyeballing niche players who offer unique spins on web searching. Farecast is an excellent search application, and if Microsoft picks up more niche applications like this, it could attract some eyeballs. Still, though, Google is not just dominant for no reason–it does the best searches I’ve found. I’m guessing Microsoft may offer some new attractions on the search front, but has an uphill battle in winning any significant share.           |
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