Web Worker Daily |
| Free Online Event on Wednesday May Appeal to Web Entrepeneurs Posted: 13 Jan 2009 04:00 PM PST We’ve recently covered opportunities for web workers who need work, including our interview with Gary Swart, CEO of online staffing marketplace oDesk, and resources for web workers who have recently lost their employment. Whether you’re looking for places to work, or looking to launch an entrepeneurial online effort, you may want to tune into a free, online event being held tomorrow by Simply Hired, in conjunction with open source conference application provider Dimdim. The interactive event is being hosted by Sramana Mitra, a successful entrepeneur, Forbes columnist, and author of the book Entrepeneurial Journeys. The webinar is to be held tomorrow, January 14th, at 11am PSt/2pm EST, and free registration is available at Eventbrite. Dimdim is hosting and providing the underlying conferencing application for the event. According to an advisory, Sramana will be speaking about and taking audience questions on: Forming a business idea Sramana founded three technology-based companies, two of which were acquired. She has also had marketing and venture capital roles in a number of other technology startups, including web-based businesses, so web workers may find her input valuable, and may want to pose questions to her. Disclosure: Simply Hired is partnered with the GigaOm Network, parent of WebWorkerDaily.    |
| 4 Ways Web Workers Can Show That They are “Real” People Posted: 13 Jan 2009 12:00 PM PST A friend of mine recently told me that she wanted to try web working. Her biggest problem, though, was getting clients. They didn’t seem to think that she was a “real” person, and not a team of scammers planning to run away after they’ve sent the initial deposit. “The problem,” I said, “is that when clients probably Googled you, as I did, you didn’t have a social networking account, your blog has very few posts… you really didn’t seem real enough.” Anyone who looks you up on the web, whether it’s a client, contractor, or potential employer, should be able to see that you’re a real person (and not, say, a Cylon). This is especially true for web workers who provide services outside their home country. How can you show your credibility in a digital world where it’s so easy to create fake evidence of a digital footprint?
It’s also important to have accounts in more than one network. This gives contacts several ways to reach you, depending on what they’re most comfortable with. If your client doesn’t receive a reply from you via email, he might send you a Facebook message, which one of my clients actually did when my email server was having problems. Don’t just put up your profile in social networks and forget them, either. “Social” is the operative word here. Make sure that you take the time to interact with your contacts and contribute some thing to the community, whether it’s links to articles that interest you, or an insight you gained while working on a project. Don’t be afraid to get a little personal. Start by using the word “I”. Usually, beginning web workers make the mistake of using “we” in their professional blog or website, as if they were a fully-staffed company and not a single-person operation from a small office in their livingroom. The former isn’t always more professional than the latter. As for more experienced web workers who publicly declare their independence, there’s nothing wrong with posting some online hints of your humanity - pet photos, a cute quote your 3-year old daughter said, or a brief blog post about your recent illness/vacation/favorite TV show. It would be even better if you can use these within the context of your branding. Give your contacts a phone or fax number. It’s no question that having an offline means of contact makes you seem more “real”. People seem more trustworthy online when they give you a non-email way to reach them, probably because they don’t feel like their message will be stuck in some email inbox queue that may or may not be read. In a recent post, Seth Godin asks his readers if they put phone numbers in their email signatures. He points out the following: “If you don’t trust me enough to give me your real phone number, I don’t trust you enough to read your mail.” Remember that he means this in the context of sending emails with people or businesses you want to make a connection with. You wouldn’t send your phone number as part of your reply to an annoying internet troll, who will probably become your annoying phone troll. If you only have a personal phone line and you don’t want to disclose this to the rest of the world, you can opt to get a business line, a Skype In number, or an e-fax service (assuming your target clients haven’t ditched faxing yet). While it may sound ridiculous to use a digital footprint as a way to quantify a person’s existence, it is a big factor when it comes to building trust online. It’s much like a brick and mortar store owner who ensures that their store sign is neat and readable, as well as hanging framed business licenses on the store walls. People who want to do business with you just need to be assured that there’s a reliable person on the other end of the line. Have you ever had instances when you didn’t trust a new contact because of their lack of a digital footprint? What do you do in those cases? Image by Joël Dietlé from Sxc.hu   |
| Exploratree: Free, Customizable Analytical Tools Posted: 13 Jan 2009 10:00 AM PST
Exploratree bills itself as a resource for discovering, sharing, and creating “thinking guides.” A thinking guide is, essentially, an analytical tool you can use as an approach to problem solving. Admittedly, the thinking guides have lots of application in a school setting, but for professional consultants, who are often only as strong as the tool box they bring to bear on a client’s issues, the possibilities are endless.
Once you’ve signed, or if you’ve opted not to, you can either create a brand new thinking guide or use one of the built-in templates. The templates are what attracted me in the first place, so that’s where I started. First I loaded up a “Futures wheel” template set up by Futurelabs, the company behind Exploratree. The tool loads in a visual flash editor, so that you can make changes, or follow the steps already established by clicking through at the bottom of the screen.
Exploratree may offer only basic tools, but sometimes its the basic tools that get the job done, a fact which is easy to forget, especially for those who’ve been in the business a long time. This site provides a lightweight, free, and efficient reminder that the simplest, most elegant solution is often the best.   |
| An Elegant Option for Collaborative Content Review Posted: 13 Jan 2009 09:00 AM PST
If you’re not in a field like this, it’s possible that many of you are involved in online training or teaching (I’ve been both an online teacher and student myself). If that’s your situation, you might want to explore how using Colaab could enrich your students’ online learning experience. There are a few web apps in this space, but there’s room for improvement. This one really got my attention when founders Paul McGinness and Bob Thomson showed me their demo at LeWeb ‘08 in December. For one thing, compared to the others I’ve seen that serve a similar purpose, this app is far superior aesthetically. The UI is elegant and clean, with a rich interface thanks to Microsift Silverlight 2. Its features are so smooth that I wish I were part of a team of designers of anything at all so I could upload images and scribble on them with my team. But alas, I work primarily in the verbal space. Still, since I happen to be right in the middle of overseeing the design of the site, logo and some collateral material for my own project, I decided to upload some of those files and see what Colaab is about. I started by creating an account, choosing the full-featured free plan that comes with 50 MB of storage space and one workspace with 10 users. Upon login, I was immediately prompted to create a workspace.
The workspace includes an integrated IM feature, and discussions are displayed in the upper part of the right-hand panel. The lower part shows which users are participating. Without having to refresh the page, you receive notification of others’ comments and messages and when team members log in or out. As you might expect, when members make annotations on the files, all those who are logged in see them, also without having to refresh. You can go to the Colaab site for more annotated screenshots, or watch their demo. Colaab has offered a special deal for Web Worker Daily readers. The first 500 who sign up using the invite code WWD can have the “Starter” package for a year for free (normally $288). Mac and PC users welcome! The application is already impressive and it has loads of promise. They’re still in beta, and eager to hear from their users. They’ve integrated the easiest feedback system I’ve ever seen (click the word Feedback in the upper left of the page and a nifty little form appears). So do try it out and let them know what you like and don’t like, and what you’d like to see! If you want to compare Colaab to some of the other apps in the design review space, you can look at ConceptShare, proofHQ and Octopz. Another is ReviewBasics. I was mildly entertained by the fact that you can leave feedback on their demo as you would if you were working in the app. So I did.   |
Have credible social networking profiles. Recently, I’ve had a few new 
The first thing I want to say about this resource is that it is a little out of the ordinary. Incredibly useful, but different in that its obvious target is students. I’m not pitching it as a resource for students, although it does satisfy that job very nicely. Instead, I think 
Within the workspace, you store and manage your resources (the files you are collaborating on). However after creating the workspace, I ran into a little bump. How to add resources to my workspace was not immediately evident. I clicked around and eventually discovered that I had to click on the workspace block that had appeared in the dashboard after I created it. Maybe there was another way, but I didn’t see it. (There were a couple of moments like that, but the learning curve is not daunting.)
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