Web Worker Daily

Clearing The Cache - Email Posted: 05 Sep 2008 03:00 PM CDT Like many of us, I spend quite a lot of time on the web and come across a staggering number of interesting things. In Clearing The Cache I choose a theme, pull out some of my favorites and share them with you here. Execupundit shares The Biggest Email Sin jkOnTheRun takes a Poke at the Peek: email only device Merlin Mann talks Inbox Zero Publish just about anything by email with Posterous Convert your webmail to standard POP/SMTP with IzyMail Share/Send

Happy Birthday, Google Posted: 05 Sep 2008 01:00 PM CDT Or more precisely, happy tenth birthday, Google. It was ten years ago this week that the little search engine company that could (and did) filed for incorporation - in part so they could cash a $100,000 check that had been made out to the then-nonexistent corporation. From that small start, they’ve grown into the juggernaut that we know today. How would your life as a web worker be different today if there were no Google? While it’s always tough to predict what might not have been, here are some of the changes that it’s brought about in my own online life. 1. Search that works. Whatever else you think of their dominance of the web search market, the plain fact is that Google search works - and it works fabulously better than what we had before. Do you remember laboriously adding AND and OR and parentheses to increasingly-baroque search strings in the hopes of forcing Alta Vista to cough up the information you were looking for? 2. Advertising everywhere. Google didn’t invent the online ad, but it wasn’t until they started organizing the huge text-ad market that I started seeing ads on every blog and web page I visited. They’ve done a lot to set the standards, both in terms of what’s acceptable as advertising and how it gets paid for. 3. Online documents. Certainly there were ways to edit documents online before Google Docs came along. But were any of them so easy for the average internet user to pick up? Have any of the alternatives caught on to the point where people routinely use them instead of desktop software to get work done? I don’t think so. 4. Huge amounts of free storage. We take huge amounts of storage online for granted these days. That may make it hard to remember that GMail, with its gigabyte free per user, was actually regarded as a hoax by many when it launched, because no one would give away that much space (it didn’t help that it was announced on April 1). GMail’s storage has stayed ahead of most users’ requirements, and forced their competitors to follow suit. What does Google mean to you as it turns ten? Do you think it can continue to have such an impact on our web working lives? Image credit: stock.xchng user salvotech Share/Send

Trends in Teleworking Posted: 05 Sep 2008 11:00 AM CDT Kurt Cagle, the managing editor of XML.com, recently explored Telework as the New Face of the Agile Workforce in a piece for O’Reilly Media. The article examines the intersection of rising fuel prices, the credit crunch, rising real estate prices and congested transport networks, contrasting them with the steady rise in teleworking and telecommuting. Here’s a few interesting notes from of Cagle’s analysis… Roadbumps On the Virtual Commute - social media, presence-based communications and web applications are helping to minimize the some of the issues around how people work together from different locations and time zones. Cagle goes on to point out the the technical limitations are now largely moot, with social limitations being of concern to most teleworkers. Telework and Agile Development -the notion of agile development, pairing experienced and inexperienced programmers through a mentoring relationship is beginning to spread to other non-software disciplines such as writers and marketeers. Risk Mitigation Through Telework - dispersing the physical and human assets of organizations can help build resilience and continuity into a business, mitigating the risk of potentially disastrous scenarios. Conversely, casting a wider net for talent and personnel opens new opportunities and ensure the best people can be engaged. The Green Telecommute - There’s a growing anxiety that teleworking simply shifts the carbon debt from organizations to individuals homes; however studies from Sun illustrate that 97% of an employee’s carbon footprint was simply due to commuting. Sadly, here in the UK telecommuting isn’t even part of the political debate on greening British cities. Telework’s Future - a rethink is required in how organizations manage people. Teleworking demographics polarize around those close to retirement and those early in their careers, each demanding a degree of flexibility in their lives. With estimates that around a third of the US workforce will demand to telework within the next four years, it’s clear organizations aren’t culturally attuned to manage a distributed workforce. I’d go further and state that government is tone deaf to the possibilities of incentivizing teleworking as a means to reduce the burden on congested transport networks. Read Kurt Cagle’s full report here… Share/Send

What to do When Your Work is Criticized Publicly Posted: 05 Sep 2008 09:00 AM CDT People can criticize an opinion you shared, a new WordPress template you designed, or even a simple question you asked on your blog. Since we spend most of our working hours online, we’re especially prone to public displays of criticism, some of which are inflammatory. How do we deal with the critics without damaging our careers? Take a step back. While it’s perfectly normal to have an initial upset reaction to your critics, it’s best to step back for a while before you defend yourself. Immediately responding to critics might add fuel to the fire and cause more damage than you’d be willing to handle. Don’t take it personally. Paradoxically, this is even more important when a critic starts making personal attacks at you. If the comments aren’t constructive and have nothing to do with your work, then they’re not worth thinking about. Also, people who rant online aren’t necessarily targeting you. It’s entirely possible that they’re not in a good mood to begin with and they’ve been seeing the glass half-empty all day. Since you never completely know all the reasons why someone would criticize you harshly, it’s best not to let it get the best of you. Get a filter. You can get your partner or a friend to read what your critics have to say. The constructive ideas, they can pass on to you so you can use the feedback to improve your work. But there are some less-constructive attacks that you don’t need to know about. Reply to those who are worth replying to. When Seth Godin recently wrote the blog post “Ads are the new online tip jar“, he received what he called a “firestorm” in his inbox. Aside from that, several bloggers wrote their own reactions to that post in their own blogs. Soon after, Godin wrote another post clarifying his point. In this case, it was essential that he replied. After all, the counterarguments he received were valid, and it was important that a proper discussion ensued. The discussion will oftentimes be more important than what other people have to say about you per se. Trolls who send you anonymous and illogical hate mail, on the other hand, should just be ignored. Learn and move on. If one of your web design projects was featured at Web Pages That Suck,figure out why it got there. Did a client corner you into incorporating his bad taste into your design? Was it a rushed project? Was it created in the mid-1990’s? Asking ourselves where the criticism comes from helps us to avoid making the same mistake twice. If some of the criticism starts making sense and helps you find a weakness in your own work, it helps to consider those ideas and see how you can learn from them. This could be a painful process, but one you have to go through if you want to grow professionally. I know I have yet to master it, but I’m working my way towards that. Criticism doesn’t always have to feel so negative. When we filter out the clutter and choose to learn from our mistakes, what seems like a bad day at work can become an important stepping stone in our careers. Were you ever criticized publicly on the web? What did you do about it? Photo Credit: Image from Kat Callard from stock.xchng Share/Send

Foxit Reader: A Free, Lightweight Adobe Alternative Posted: 04 Sep 2008 06:00 PM CDT If you’ve spent much time with Adobe’s applictions for working with PDFs, you know that they’re not the fastest applications under the sun, and they provide their  share of annoyances when doing updates, and when uninstalling. For a free, alternative application you can turn to, Foxit Reader for Windows is a good choice. (There are also versions for Linux and mobile devices.) Foxit Reader is much smaller than Adobe Reader, so one of the best things about it is how fast it loads and unloads. It also makes it easy to easy to convert PDF documents to text. The latest version 2.3 of the application, downloadable here, now includes multimedia features for playing the audio and video that sometimes accompany PDFs. In the release notes for version 2.3 of Foxit Reader, you’ll find an inventory of the new additions. In addition to what has always been a very useful toolbar implementation, version 2.3 lets you open PDFs in multiple, tabbed instances, very much like working with a tabbed browser. There are also collaboration tools for annotating PDFs with text and more. The multimedia features and collaboration features are good additions, but the reason I use Foxit Reader remains the speed. The application is a fraction of the size of Adobe Reader. I need to get in and out of PDFs frequently, and this application does it much faster than Adobe does. How do you work with PDFs? Share/Send

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