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| Eva Schweber: Coworking Community Insights Posted: 31 Mar 2009 04:00 PM PDT Written by Dawn Foster. In an effort to better understand the inner workings of a coworking business, I spoke with Eva Schweber, co-owner of CubeSpace in Portland, Ore. In her spare time, Schweber serves on the Mayor's Economic Recovery Cabinet and chairs the Small Business Development Workgroup of the City of Portland's Small Business Advisory Council. She also sits on the City Club of Portland's Research Board and in June 2007 was appointed by Governor Ted Kulongowski to serve on Oregon's Commission for Voluntary Action and Service. Her blog is her attempt to reconcile her ever-growing interest in small business with her wonkish tendencies. WWD: Why did you decide to open a coworking space in Portland? Schweber: Those are actually two separate questions. Why did we decide to open a co-working space, and why Portland? The coworking idea came from experiences David and I had as freelancers and the logistical and social challenges we faced. We had also heard many of the same complaints from our colleagues. We saw that there were no options in Portland for freelancers wanting occasional work space outside their home, a private meeting space or a meeting space that could accommodate more than a couple of people. So we decided to fill that niche. Why Portland? Portland is a small town masquerading as a medium-sized city. No one is more than one or two degrees from everyone else, so communities connect organically. Since we wanted to create a workspace community that was independent of industry or sector, Portland was the natural place for us. WWD: How do you think that the coworking market in Portland is different than or similar to other cities, like New York and San Francisco? Schweber: It depends on the type of coworking space. The idea for CubeSpace's undedicated workspaces came from a New York Times article about a writer's coworking space in New York. Given the expensive housing market and tiny apartments in New York, a workspace outside one's home is almost a necessity. People there literally have their home office in a closet. A coworking space would be a huge benefit to newcomers who freelance or telecommute. It would provide an entry point for making connections, a critical need in a city that size. There are some really successful coworking spaces in San Francisco who cluster around industry. Maybe that is because the dot-com era brought a lot of tech folks into the region and they are naturally drawn to each other. Several San Francisco to Portland transplants have told me that San Francisco is a very competitive city that inhibits the formation of communities. I can see that being both a help and a hindrance to the San Francisco coworking market. WWD: What are your biggest challenges during these tough economic times and what have you been doing to mitigate your risk as a coworking business? Schweber: For better or worse we began to see the economic downturn very early on. Microbusinesses and startups often lack the cushion necessary to sustain themselves in a down market. But the early warning signal gave us time to diversify our revenue stream. When adding additional services or resources, we have always taken the lead from the community. We had seen the challenges that our community face with client management, fee structures, invoicing, etc. and had been offering assistance on an ad hoc basis. As we saw more folks laid off and looking for work, and more work being contracted out, we formalized contract and project management services. These services give customers who are not members incentives to spend more time at CubeSpace, which also strengthens community ties. WWD: What is your vision for the coworking industry over the next 5-10 years? How do you think the industry will change? Schweber: We are still in the early days of coworking, and it remains a foreign concept to many. People who work in tech have become comfortable with non-traditional work spaces because the dot-com era changed the office paradigm. That is why we have seen tech workers on the leading edge of coworking. The economic downturn has made people much more price-sensitive. The high unemployment rate is creating more business startups whose owners are desperately seeking support and community. Those two elements combined are strong incentives for people to look beyond what they are familiar with and venture into coworking spaces. The industry will have to evolve to meet the needs of these new populations, but it is hard to predict exactly what will change. There will likely be more traditionally “professional looking” coworking spaces. The shortage of jobs for recent college graduates will produce more young entrepreneurs who are looking for the mentorship that used to come from their employers. The range of services coworking spaces offer will increase as the coworking population diversifies. How do you see the coworking movement evolving over the next 5-10 years?        |
| Use Ping.fm to Reach All Your Online Profiles at Once Posted: 31 Mar 2009 03:00 PM PDT Written by Eric Berlin.
Ping.fm, a service that allows you to easily update a host of social networking and social media profiles all at once, seeks to resolve the headache of needing to log into multiple accounts to send the same message to different groups of friends and contacts all over the Internet. While for some Ping.fm may just be a nice little time-saving utility, for social media and online marketing professionals, this service may well be a killer app. Ping.fm currently supports more than 30 services, including microblogging platforms such as Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku, social networking web sites such as Facebook and Multiply, instant messaging applications such as GTalk Status and AIM Status, and most of the popular blogging platforms. Once you’ve set up a Ping.fm account and added your credentials for the services you use for social networking and social media purposes, you’re ready to return to your Ping.fm dashboard to send messages out to all of your profiles at once. Adding your various social networks can be a little clunky simply because you need to have all of your various usernames, passwords and network keys at your disposal, but Ping.fm does a pretty good job of making the process as seamless as possible. On the dashboard page, you can send out messages, or “pings,” to your selected services. The default setting sends your message to all of your services, but you can also filter profiles by “micro-blogs” or “statuses.” This is a nice feature, giving you the ability to parse your messages into groups, but I must admit that I don’t entirely understand which services fall into which categories (is FriendFeed a “micro-blog” or a “status”, for instance?). A character counter also lets you know the size of your ping, which is vitally important for squeezing your message in under Twitter’s 140-characters-per-tweet limit, for example. And a “Record Video” link allows you to stream a video recording directly through Ping.fm. A nice feature is the ability to send out messages through Ping.fm “from” multiple locations. A huge array of “Services/Tools” on the dashboard allow you to set up your Ping.fm account so that you can ping via email, SMS, instant message, Facebook app, iPhone app, desktop app, and so on. This serves up enormous flexibility in allowing you to send a single message from anywhere and distribute your message to a large number of profile destinations quickly and easily. The potential downsides to using Ping.fm are overlap and not engaging with individual social media and social networking communities as they are intended. Overlap comes in the form of having many of the same friends, colleagues and contacts on multiple services; sending them the same message “over and over again” on multiple profiles might only serve to annoy. Additionally, social media and social networking sites are meant to be two-way communications platforms, not one-way broadcasting mechanisms. If people perceive you as being someone who is broadcasting marketing messages and not interested in engaging with individual communities or, even worse, spamming communities with marketing messages and links, that can seriously damage your ability to effectively utilize social media for whatever purpose –- developing relationships, promoting a product or service, burnishing your professional reputation, and so on -– you had in the first place. Overall, Ping.fm looks to be a simple (in a good way), effective, and easy-to-use service to communicate to multiple online communities quickly. What do you think of Ping.fm?      |
| A Freelancer’s Dilemma: Ethically Dubious Projects Posted: 31 Mar 2009 01:00 PM PDT Written by Celine Roque. Some years ago a web designer asked me if I thought it was right for him to design a site for a religious group whose values he completely disagreed with. “The site is actively promoting their beliefs,” he said, “and I’m not sure I want to be a part of that.” I was reminded of his dilemma last week, when a potential client contacted me to ask if I could write sales copy for his multilevel marketing scheme — at twice my usual fee. After doing a bit of research on the company, however, it became apparent that this person was running a scam. As freelancers, we sometimes get requests that we find shady. These can range from the above examples to creating promotional materials for companies whose ethics we don’t completely agree with. How do we deal with these requests? A Resounding “No!” “Would you accept a freelance project that goes against your ethics or values?” When I posed this question to several freelancers, most quickly said they wouldn’t. “No real professional would ever do such a thing,” said Eugene Rembor, a management consultant. The good news is that we freelancers have the freedom to be selective about which projects on which we work. We can easily turn down clients if the company, business or product doesn’t correspond with our personal ethics. The Gray Area But while most of the freelancers I asked said they wouldn’t accept such jobs, there are those who recognize a gray area. For example, a few of the freelancers I talked to said that although they wouldn’t take ethically ambiguous or dubious jobs, they might feel otherwise if they found themselves financially desperate. “There is a difference between something I do not believe in and something that I think is unethical or illegal,” said freelance editor Beth Beaty. As she noted, sometimes her clients write books or articles that support ideas with which she doesn’t agree. “The higher ‘ethic’, if you want to call it that, for me is that everyone’s voice should be heard,” she explained, “and I am not here to judge the author’s beliefs or the marketability of their ideas.” According to her, as long as the project is legal and the client is trustworthy, she will provide high-quality work. I’ve often applied these ideas to my own work. I was once hired to edit web site content about astrology. I don’t believe in astrology, but I felt that I should do the work. The client was an honest person who believed in her web site and wanted it to be better; she genuinely cared about her audience. I’d do the job again, just because I respected the client’s intentions. Drawing the Line There doesn’t seem to be a concrete rule on how to tackle ethically questionable requests. Each client, situation and project has to be assessed individually. It’s up to you where to draw the line. As for my potential client’s multilevel marketing scheme, I turned it down. I wouldn’t have been directly involved in the scheme, but I didn’t want to help promote it, either. I’m not comfortable with writing something that convinces honest people to waste their money in a scam, especially in these economically trying times. And I have no doubt that someone out there is going to do this job -– it just won’t be me. Do you ever get requests for projects that don’t correspond with your ethics or values? What do you do when those opportunities arise?      |
| My Lifestreaming Apps Wish List Posted: 31 Mar 2009 11:00 AM PDT Written by Imran Ali.
Last week, for example, Simon covered the release of skimmer, a desktop client that brings together notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other services. Also recently launched is Cosmic Machine’s EventBox, a Mac-only application that similarly mashes together notifications and messages from a range of web services: Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr and Reddit, as well as the capability to import raw RSS feeds. Both skimmer and EventBox are pretty and pull a variety of web services into a single stream of information. But as a heavy user of multiple social networks and web apps, neither provides me with any real ability to manage the stream of information I get from all those web services. As far as I can tell, all they really do is to move noise from several separate sources into a single cacophony of content. There are some limited filters to fish out particular keywords from the stream, but nothing that I couldn’t use an RSS reader -– like Google Reader -– to replicate. So here’s what I’d love to see from lifestreaming tools:
So, what do you want to see in your lifestreaming toolbox?      |
| How To Monitor Online Conversations Posted: 31 Mar 2009 09:00 AM PDT Written by Dawn Foster. Keeping up with online conversations can be a daunting task. As a freelance consultant, I not only need to keep up with what people are saying about me and my company, but I also need to monitor the latest industry trends to learn new skills and stay relevant. While wearing my blogging hat, I also have to keep up with conversations that would be interesting to web workers for this blog, or relevant for people building online communities for my own blog. Interesting conversations are happening all over the web, on blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and many other sites. People are talking about you, your company and your industry, and revealing many tips and tricks that you should know. I am a self-confessed data junkie, so I have a few tips to help you make sense of the massive amounts of data available and to focus on monitoring just what really matters. Use a Dashboard An RSS-based monitoring dashboard is a great way to collect everything you’re monitoring into one place. I’ve set these up for clients in a number of different ways depending on the preference of the person responsible for monitoring. For people new to RSS, I generally encourage them to use something like Netvibes, which has a visual layout with multiple tabs and columns where you can see several key conversations at a glance. I have a couple of sections in my RSS reader where I keep everything that I’m monitoring, and I make sure that they are the first things I read. Filter Your Feeds Filtering RSS feeds through Yahoo Pipes or other tools is a good way to make sure that your monitoring dashboard contains relevant content and not just a list of blogs to read. I use Yahoo Pipes to filter for mentions of my name, my company and efforts that I am involved with across various sites (Twitter, FriendFeed, blogs, Flickr, video sites, etc.) Yahoo Pipes can also be used to combine many feeds and filter those high-volume RSS feeds for only relevant content that you need to know. Tools like PostRank are a good way to find the posts within a feed that are generating the most buzz. Choose the Right Twitter Client Use a smart Twitter client that lets you group the important people that you want to monitor and provides a way to get real-time notifications for mentions of certain keywords. TweetDeck is a good choice. I have a couple of different groups set up to help make sure that I see the posts from people who have important ideas and who provide me with the greatest value. I also have keyword searches in TweetDeck for companies or events that I am involved with to make sure that I don’t miss any important conversations about these efforts on Twitter. Find Hot Topics With FriendFeed FriendFeed is a great way to find the hot topics of the day, to make sure that you’re keeping up with industry trends and new tools or techniques that you can apply to your work. I like to group people by topic, like community management, and use the “best of” feature to find the best posts of the day, week or month from those subgroups of people. The example below shows the best post of the month from my “News Makers” group. It’s an easy way for me to filter the flood of content in FriendFeed down to something much more manageable.  FriendFeed Best of Month While monitoring is important, you should also be responding to these conversations. People are more likely to engage with you in future if they get a response back, rather than feeling like their feedback went into a black hole. Respond to as many @replies on Twitter as you can, and also use your blog for longer responses or to post reactions to relevant conversations that are happening across the web. What are your tips and tricks for monitoring online conversations?      |
| Onehub: Simple, Customizable File Sharing and Collaboration Posted: 31 Mar 2009 07:00 AM PDT Written by Darrell Etherington.
There might be a lot of collaboration portal web applications out there, but few work as well or offer as simple a setup as Onehub. I’m not sure how long it took me to get everything ready, but I’m fairly sure that the same song was playing on iTunes when I finished as when I started. And no, my 40GB music library had not completely cycled.
Even if you are in a hurry, building out a standard Hub won’t take you very much more time. You pick a title, a description, and a custom, unique URL (Onehub will generate one automatically from your Hub’s title if you’re not fussy). Then you can choose from a selection of preset Hub templates, which automatically includes certain widgets depending on the package you choose, so that your Hub will be ready to use as soon as it’s deployed. If you’d rather build your Hub from scratch, you can choose a blank template and add widgets yourself from the dashboard.
Onehub is the perfect solution for those looking for collaboration software that can be set up quickly and easily, but that can also grow and change as needed as the project progresses. It doesn’t hurt that it’s free for one Hub with up to 1GB of storage, either. For more Hubs and more storage, Onehub has a range of paid plans. Have you used Onehub? What did you think?      |
Often it’s the (seemingly) simple applications that turn out to be the most powerful, and the most popular. 
I’m dissatisfied with the current crop of “lifestreaming” apps. Overall, I think they’re missing a huge opportunity to help users focus their limited attention to the content that really matters.
Often a project team needs to be up and running without much lead time, and you don’t have the time or the inclination to come up with a customized, tailored solution for collaboration and file sharing.
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