Web Worker Daily |
| Google’s Finally Getting Things Done Posted: 03 Feb 2009 02:15 AM PST
Well, we’re not quite there yet, but Google yesterday announced that Gmail’s recently-launched Tasks feature had been repackaged for mobile browsers for iPhone and Android as well as functioning independently of Gmail. The feature works well on the iPhone, particularly when added to the Home Screen with it’s own icon, giving it the feel of a native application. With the simultaneous availability of Tasks for iGoogle, it seems Google is taking baby steps to unbundle Tasks from Gmail; with some APIs and syncing capabilities, it could evolve into a valuable tool for web workers…and indeed, Google’s own advertising business! Now if only they’d unbundle Gmail’s Contacts, too… The mobile Tasks feature is available at http://gmail.com/tasks, requiring users to sign in with their usual Gmail credentials.        |
| Google Toolbar for Firefox Adds Useful Navigation Features Posted: 02 Feb 2009 04:00 PM PST If you’ve used Google’s open source Chrome browser and appreciated the way it collects thumbnail versions of the sites you visit most on one handy page, but you tend to use Firefox most often, give the updated beta version of the Google Toolbar for Firefox a try. It’s a downloadable extension that you can get here, and there is also a video showing how it works. Its best feature is that it too will collect thumbnails of your most visited sites, a useful navigation feature. Here’s how it looks and works. As seen below, the Google Toolbar for Firefox collects thumbnails of your most visited sites in a way similar to how Chrome does so. It also collects your recent bookmarks and your recently closed tabs in one place. Especially if you tend to concentrate on a handful of sites throughout the day, these features make navigating faster and easier. The toolbar also lets you jump straight to Gmail, search news sites quickly, and more. In a post on the Google blog you’ll find information on many of the new features, and Google also has a Help Center for the Toolbar, with a Getting Started guide, details on browsing tools, and more. The Toolbar remains a beta project, and you can send Google requests for additions here. Note that the thumbnail gathering is not supported in Firefox 2. You need to be running version 3 or greater. The Google Toolbar for Firefox remains my default toolbar in the browser, and the new features are useful. Along with the speed improvements in the beta versions of Firefox 3.1, you can get things done faster.      |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2009 09:34 AM PST As you will probably have read on Friday, Judi Sohn has stepped down as editor of WebWorkerDaily. I’m the site’s new editor. I’d like to thank Judi for the work that she’s done on WWD and also for making the transition between editors as simple and painless as it could possibly be. I’m thrilled that she’ll be staying on as Senior Writer: she has a great voice, plenty of valuable experience, and will make a fantastic lead for our team of writers here. We have some exciting changes planned for the site that we’ll be introducing shortly, but in this post I’d like to briefly talk about WebWorkerDaily. Om Malik started the site back in September 2006 with a vision for a blog that would cover the new way of working for the increasing number of people no longer chained to their desks; those who work from home, a cafe, or wherever they could set their laptop and get an internet connection (the “neo-Bedouin”, to use a term coined by Greg Olsen). 2006 was only a couple of short years ago now, but the trend for flexible working means that, in that time, many more people have joined our tribe of nomadic workers. The proliferation of mobile devices with internet connectivity, increasingly available wi-fi, and coworking spaces blossoming in many cities means that the web working lifestyle is accessible to many more people than it was even a couple of years ago. One of the things that I’ve been working on is a “manifesto”, a statement of what I think WebWorkerDaily is and should be. I’d like to share it with you.
We’ll be working hard to make sure that our content achieves those goals to make WebWorkerDaily the best resource for you that it can be. I want us to be an integral part of the web working community: we thrive on your feedback. So, please, feel free to share your feedback and suggestions in the comments, or email me at tips@webworkerdaily.com.      |
| Online Community Manager: What Does It Take to be Successful? Posted: 02 Feb 2009 09:00 AM PST  Photo by semaphoria This is the third in a series of online community manager posts over the past couple of weeks here on WebWorkerDaily. I’ve already talked about online community manager jobs and what community managers actually do, so I thought that we’d talk about what it takes to be successful as a community manager. There are skills to learn and work habits that are useful for community managers. Here are just a few of the skills and habits that people have already mentioned in the comments of the previous posts. Amber Naslund says, “it's not a 9 to 5 gig, and it's a hybrid of so many disciplines - communication, business development, online knowledge, customer or client service.” Joe Manna says, “most successful community managers are those that come from a strong customer service background.” Lex Friedman says, “If you like to listen and love acting on good ideas (regardless of their source!), you're probably a good fit for the career path.” I also have my own list of what it takes to manage an online community.
What do you think it takes to be a successful community manager?      |
| The Language of the Web Worker Posted: 02 Feb 2009 08:00 AM PST In a recent Daily Beast post, Tina Brown talks about how everyone she knows is “hustling for gigs.” As I was reading the article, I noticed a few interesting things about the language in the post - mainly all of the words with “gig” in them: gig economy, gigonomics, and gigocracy. We seem to have our own language to describe what we do as web workers.
I usually respond with some variant of the rambling found below when someone asks me what I do.
This is usually followed by questions about what all of this really means, how I make money doing this, or how I manage to do all of this without losing my mind. How do you describe the breadth of what you do without sounding like a crazy person? Do we, as web workers, have our own language?      |
| Snowfalls in Britain Forcing Many to Work from Home Posted: 02 Feb 2009 07:13 AM PST  A car in the snow Large parts of the UK have been seriously disrupted by snowfall today, with the South East of the country seeing its worst snowfalls in 18 years. With many people unable to make it to work - or in some cases, making it to work only to find their offices shut - we may see the ranks of web workers swell temporarily over the next day or two (in fact, there have been anecdotal reports of webmail services running slowly today under increased traffic) One of the advantages of web working is not having to deal with the stress of the daily commute, but on days like today, with trains cancelled, chaos on the roads, and snow continuing to fall outside with more forecast to come, it makes me very glad that I can work from the warm comfort of my kitchen. Have you been affected by the weather in the UK? (photo by stock.xchng user Mattox)      |
| Project Management, Collaboration, and How Our Brains Work Posted: 02 Feb 2009 07:00 AM PST
The more I explore project management and collaboration options, the more clearly I see that I gravitate toward either the simpler (Basecamp) or the more visual (5pm). I have a very hard time with linear (Wrike) although I do like Wrike’s reminder lists a lot. And despite loving graphics, for some reason the visual of a Gantt Chart view just doesn’t compute with me. The two most recent project management/collaboration tools I’m looking at are Assembla and ProjectThingy. Knowing more about how my brain accepts - and rejects - data input and the presentation of that data, I’ve been approaching both of these tools in a new, more informed way. The Workstream of Assembla My first impression of Assembla was “this was created by software programmers for software programmers.” Nothing wrong with that, however: Assembla has a linear, straightforward and literal interface. No nonsense, no superfluous frills. It’s functional, practical and pragmatic. David Parmet at Assembla says the app’s tools are for anyone working in a distributed team. You have the option of selecting pre-configured spaces including Software Development, Team Collaboration, Graphic Designers, and an Enhanced Subversion Repository. While the focus is broader than software developers, the options seem to be prioritized with developers in mind. As a marketer, for example, I didn’t feel immediately accommodated. Parmet points out that Assembla also has staffing management tools built in. The entire work arrangement including contract and time management can be handled through the system’s staffing tool. Andy Singleton, CEO and founder of Assembla, validated my observation that the company’s target market is software developers with distributed teams. “We provide them with a comprehensive set of tools for code management, task management (such as) ticketing, collaboration, time tracking, and what we call workstreaming - a view of what the team is doing, through alerts and the “Stream” page.,” says Singleton, adding, “This helps them start work faster and be more productive.” Singleton does emphasize that the non-development team can take advantage of Assembla workspaces and tools available to everyone on any team. About a third of the Assembla workspaces consist of general collaboration tools such as a wiki, messaging, alerts, etc. Assembla launched in 2006 and grew to 100K users as a mainly free service. In Q4 08, Assembla converted private workspaces to a paid model and since then, the company has been aggressively adding new features and improvements. Upcoming features include: 1. Templates - any Assembla workspace can be used as a template for another space. Assembla will provide a “commission” if your clients subscribe to their service using your customized, branded workspace. 2. Developer’s Toolkit - In the spirit of open source, Assembla offers developers a kit to add tools and make all of their code available with an open (but not free) license. 3. Assembla’s workstreaming features, according to Singleton, include:
Moving on to ProjectThingy
From the ProjectThingy Dashboard, you can see: 1. Projects That’s it. But when it comes to collaboration, aren’t those the core items we need anyway? ProjectThingy is simple, but just because it’s simple it doesn’t mean that it’s lacking in usefulness. My brain immediately gets what I can do with it and how I can use it. It has its limitations (no RSS subscriptions or alerts, for example), but it is really easy to use. 5pm, on the other hand, had a steep learning curve for some of my virtual team members and others still aren’t using it properly. ProjectThingy founder Chris Ritke loves the idea of building real applications as embeddable widgets and he started with UploadThingy (an embeddable large file upload form) in May 2008. He started ProjectThingy around the Fall of 2008 but was hesitant to make it publicly available until more recently. “Let’s face it - project collaboration is a boring old thing,” Ritke admits. “But I think this new twist is exciting - and I’m seeing a lot of interest in the concept.” ProjectThingy’s CSS is minimal so the look and feel of your Dashboard basically is your own site’s design. Ritke cops to the simplicity of his app’s functionality and that the real focus is on collaborating and sharing versus scheduling. Says Ritke, “In these days of blogs and Twitter, I think it’s important to focus on keeping team members connected. And also team members trusting and respecting each other. So you’ll see that all team members have the same permissions. Because if you need permissions because you don’t trust your team then I would say there’s something wrong with the team culture - too many permissions just make everything unnecessarily complicated.” Another plus about ProjectThingy is that file attachments can be up to 1GB. No Gantt charts on the horizon for ProjectThingy, says Ritke. That’s certainly a relief for my brain. He is, however, toying with a CRM-type Thingy as well as a number of other Thingies already in the works. So, which one to use? Because these two applications - Assembla and ProjectThingy - are meant to serve slightly different purposes, it is hard to pick one over the other and that decision needs to be based first on your need to get things done and then how your brain works: which one suits the way that your brain likes to receive information and interact with an application. My brain works quite happily with ProjectThingy. What about yours? Update Ritke from ProjectThingy emailed to say that his app does have email alerts: they are in the My Profile area. “Maybe they’re a little hidden,” he wrote. Well, they did hide from me! In My Profile, you have a number of choices for the alerts you’d like to receive including messages assigned to you and work items assigned to you.      |
Last month, 
I’ve been struggling with the learning curves inherent in adapting new project management and collaboration tools for my own company and have 
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