WebWorkerDaily

In this week s edition of John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman s hilarious podcast, The Bugle, Zaltzman offers his own solution to the isolation of working from home Do you work from home but miss the office atmosphere? Then simply hire a group of people you don t really like and would never otherwise spend time with, to mill around your living room for nine hours a day. Priceless! Download the full episode (28mb) and skip ahead to 1m:20s Share/Send

Are you happy with your cell phone? Do you feel you get enough value from your landline provider? What s next in the communications world? These and many other topics are up for discussion at the Emerging Communications (eComm) Conference next month in Silicon Valley, California. Industry heavyweights such as Skype, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, and more are scheduled to present at eComm; making it both an intriguing and stellar lineup. The eComm Conference takes place March 12-14. I was able to interview Lee Dryburgh, organizer of the conference. We discuss: How mobile communications are about to be revolutionized How VoIP is just the beginning of synchronous voice communication Ways web workers can benefit from connected internet telephony How open devices and open spectrum will benefit a distributed team Check out the 25-minute podcast below. We look forward to reading your comments. Share/Send

Figuring out how to optimize your web sites is a job best left to the pros. After all, they re the ones who should be spending a lot of time trying to understand how the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) operate and how to boost your site s rankings against their algorithms. But if you re running a small business, how do you find somebody who can really help you do the job? We asked Randy Zlobec, a search engine marketing (SEM) expert, to share his advice for hiring a consultant. Zlobec is the author of the upcoming book, Search Engine Optimization, due in December, which is intended to give small website owners the opportunity to grasp what SEM is and to implement it in their own marketing. Put together a shortlist of possible SEM candidates. Zlobec recommends doing a search on search engine marketing consultant or search engine optimization specialist. He also suggests visiting topseos.com, a site that lists all the major SEM consultants and marketing firms. It provides a ranked listing of the best firms, based on responses to a set of questions, such as What are the applicant firm s competitive advantages? How are the applicant s services and pricing levels superior to the competition? and What other attributes/innovations does the applicant provide to set it apart from the competition? Once you ve identified finalists, ask them a few simple questions. How long have you been in the business? (The longer the better.) How long have you been an SEM consultant? (Likewise.) What was your previous job? (Was it technology-related and something totally different?) How long do your clients remain with you? (A good sign of customer service.) Have you done repeat jobs with any of them? (The best testimonial.) Ask for a couple of client names with web sites and search terms they ve optimized the sites for. Type those terms into Google, Yahoo and MSN to find out just how the sites rank. If they re not on the first page of results, find somebody else who can get you there, Zlobec said. Once you ve confirmed the results, get references. Here, said Zlobec, you ll want to be cautious. If somebody claims to have optimized a particular site but can t name a contact person at the client, move onto the next consultant. I do a lot of research myself. I ve heard many of [my competitors] say, Well, based on non-disclosures [I can t reveal that information]. Don t buy it. If you re doing a search engine marketing campaign for somebody, they re not going to tie you down so much that you couldn’t tell another potential customer to use them as a reference. Don t count on doing a pilot project; it s all or nothing when it comes to SEM. It takes quite a bit of time to increase link popularity, Zlobec said. It would take a few months. You can t really give somebody a small project and say, Well, let s see how you can do on this. There s a lot of strategy behind SEM, he said, both on-page and off-page. The on-page optimization is the back end code meta code, alt tags, description and title tags. The off-page stuff is link building, article writing and distribution and pay per click campaigns, he said. You have to combine that. The engines take time to come and re-index web sites. It s not going to happen overnight. Last, make sure you re not dealing with somebody who uses Black Hat techniques. One example is creating doorway pages. These are additional pages within a web site that could help increase the search engine ranking. Sounds good, right? According to Zlobec, You re going to hire the consultant, they re going to use their black hat techniques, you pay them and they leave and move onto the next client. Then you ll find your site a few months down the road put onto Google s blacklist. You ll never rank. The search engines are getting smarter and smarter every day, he said. They re going to find you one way or the other. You could come up with techniques that are borderline shady, and you don t want to do that. That s why, said Zlobec, you should expect to pay an upfront setup fee and a monthly maintenance fee. The engines change constantly. You want them to follow that change and do whatever needs to be done to get them up to the top of those engines. What s your advice for locating just the right SEM expert? Share This

Yet Another Choice for Projects - Clarizen offers on-demand collaborative online project management. One of their twists is that they allow sending and receiving progress updates via email, so you don t need to buy a seat for every team member involved in project. The Community Part is Still Coming - Right now Office Live Workspace Community is primarily a group blog from the folks at Microsoft involved with Office Live Workspace, the online adjunct to Office. But they say they also want it to become a hub of activity involving their users, and they re looking for suggestions on how best to implement that. The New Face of Social Networking - That s what Raxxle promises to deliver. They re offering facial recognition to match up member photos with each other and with celebrities, and other innovative tools and features. Taking beta signups now if you re moved by that pitch. The (Un)-Rules - If you ve ever had to try to get a participatory workshop going in the face of participants who thought they were there just to be spectators, this whiteboard from WWD contributor Stephen Collins could come in handy. Sometimes you just need to nudge people out of their complacency zone. Nobody Likes a Gossip - The (un)privacy implications of Facebook s new Beacon advertising platform are starting to sink in, and some folks are not very happy about them.  Om Malik is calling for a boycott of Facebook partners until this is resolved, while Nate Weiner has figured out how to use a Firefox plugin to block information from being sent to Beacon in the first place. Share This

Leopard Leaps: If you have any interest in such things, you probably know that Mac OS X Leopard shipped yesterday; indeed, you may have been one of the hordes waiting anxiously for the delivery truck. If you re still on the fence about whether to upgrade your own Mac, tuaw.com has been running a 24 hours of Leopard series that highlights the most interesting new features. Personally, I don t see anything that s going to change my web working life (yet), but it sure is purty. Shake Up Those Tasks: Lifeshaker is a to-do list app for OS X that features a grid view of goals that lets you get an overview of things that should be at the top of your mind, as well as various other funky visual and audio effects. Might be fun if you re tired of the corporate look for your task list. Throw Away Your Scanner: Well, maybe. If you have a high-resolution digital camera (including one on your mobile phone), you can send photos of documents to scanR and get them converted into nice PDFs for you. Turns your camera into an outgoing fax machine, too. An API to Social Networks - Rapleaf, the service that s trying to track reputations and memberships across social networks, now has a RESTful API to let others leverage their data. It s free for up to 4,000 queries per day. Share This

Yet another widespread Blackberry outage. Yet another software glitch to blame. It started around 10 am eastern yesterday (September 7) and appeared to resolve by bedtime. Unlike the outage that made headlines last April, this time it only affected BIS (Blackberry Internet Service) subscribers, not BES (Enterprise) users. TGIF indeed. In the meantime, RIM shows folks that Apples aren t the only fruit that can be fun, with a new consumer-focused application portal. Blackberrys are good for more than email? Who knew? The Office 2.0 Conference has come and gone. Among the announcements coming out of the conference is Zoho Business. Designed to take on Google Apps, Zoho Business packages Zoho apps with centralized sign-in and other SMB-friendly features. Click here for blog posts tagged for the conference in Google Reader, and on Technorati. Speak of Google Reader, at long last the web-based aggregator FINALLY has search! They ve also increased the unread indicator from 100+ to 1000+ (they ll have to add another zero for this to be useful for me) and some other slight tweaks. Read all about it on the official Google Reader blog. Years after del.icio.us rolled into Yahoo, there s an overhaul of the popular social bookmark application in the works. Goodbye del.icio.us hello delicious.com. If you re interested in playing with it, add your name to the list and maybe you ll get an invite (will show up on your links for you page). TechCrunch and Read/Write Web have sneak peeks with screen shots. To kick of the holiday shopping season, Apple introduced brand new versions of every iPod. The Shuffle got RED, the Nano got squashed, the iPod got Classic and Touch (aka iPhone without the phone). Unfortunately for Apple, all that was overshadowed by a $200 price drop on the 8GB version of the iPhone that got their most loyal fan base upset. Folks who live on the tech bleeding edge are used to seeing their first-on-their-block purchases depreciate before they re out of the store. Apple learned the hard way that a certain amount of time must elapse before an announced price drop, and 9 weeks isn t it. A lesson for any company: folks care about the health of the companies that make products they care about, but they care about their own interests and wallet more. In a rare mea culpa, Apple is offering a $100 store gift certifcate to iPhone early adopters. GigaOM contributor Kevin Kelleher doesn t think this was a spur-of-the-oops move. What do you think? Speak of mea culpa, Rapleaf, with their tagline of It is more profitable to be ethical got themselves into trouble with the blogosphere after a critical post on ZDnet brought to light some practices that could be construed as being on the shady side. If you were one of the many who received an email that began with, Someone researched your reputation on Rapleaf then you may want to read Rapleaf s exhaustive explanation and apology. Rapleaf collects already public information from social networking profiles. Is this more reason for a social web bill of rights? Whose information is it, anyway? While the pundits fight it out, apophenia has some outstanding tips for controlling your public appearance on the web. Should be required reading for anyone who sets up a profile anywhere. Share This

Although not all web workers prefer to work outside of corporate offices, a lot of us do. So finding companies that are amenable to the idea of telecommuting is always a boon. Those organizations often have leadership that is comfortable with the idea of managing people who are out of sight. One such firm is SunGard Higher Education, based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, which provides software, consulting and outsourcing services to 1,600 universities and colleges worldwide. According to senior VP Jeff Cottle, the company has 2,800 employees, of which 700 are assigned as remote and do not have an office location. Many of the others telecommute on a flex schedule, he said. We don t have a formal policy about who can and who can t telecommute. Our managers make the decision of whether an individual can telecommute. When making that decision, the manager considers the person s work responsibilities and his or her performance, among other factors. To find out what employment at SunGard as a telecommuter is like, we talked to Christine Mitchell, a professional services consultant specializing in content management. Mitchell is often on the road, training people within client sites. At the time of our interview, she was actually recovering from foot surgery. And that, she said, was one of the advantages of telecommuting. If I were in a corporate office, I would feel compelled to take less time to heal because I d have to get up and get dressed and go to work. Or I d be using short-term disability. This way, I m handling clients from my living room because I need to sit in my recliner with my foot up. The flexibility extends to ordinary life too. It doesn t matter if I have to take the car in for an appointment or go to the doctor or take my mother in for an appointment, said Mitchell. It doesn t matter if I want to get up at three in the morning or eight. I can schedule that. Her manager is savvy about telecommuting, because he does it too. Mitchell s team meets by phone, though not on a regular schedule, because people are traveling all the time. It’s not like you can say, We re going to have this meeting at 3 p.m., because somebody might be with a client [then], she said. So we tend to find a spot, most often after hours maybe 7 or 8 at night when everyone can dial in from all different time zones. Mitchell, whose kids are grown, appreciates the company s policies on travel. They don t ever have us travel on the weekend, unless we go overseas, she said. Travel to the client site happens on Monday; return is on Thursday night. That s an ideal situation, she said. You re not traveling Sunday night unless it s really far away. And you re not coming home on Saturday morning. It fits my lifestyle really well. Her tools of the trade are nothing more complex than a notebook computer, standard office applications and the corporate VPN for access to the network for email and IBM Lotus Sametime for messaging. The company provides the other office equipment she uses, as well as a Raindance account for setting up virtual classrooms for training sessions with clients and coworkers. Mitchell also received a webcam, which she can choose to use to show her face during calls, but she chooses not to, she said, because I don t want to comb my hair and get dressed. More specifically, she added, I was finding my connection choppy because of the video, so I stopped using it. The company brings together employees twice a year in person once in January for a training week in San Diego and again in the summer for a family fest in Hersheypark. Of course, telecommuting has one downside, said Mitchell. At her last job, which was on-site in company headquarters, I loved the people I worked with. We had a lot of fun, she said. We did happy hours. Those are harder to come by now. Does your company push telecommuting? If so, how do they make it easier and less isolating for you? Share This

MoveOn.org is a poster child for virtual companies. Its staff is entirely distributed. It holds no scheduled meetings. And when it decided to gather for a retreat, it did so virtually. In a panel during Software 2007 in Santa Clara, CA, MoveOn co-founder Wes Boyd shared his organization s approach to operation, including how they held a six-hour virtual corporate retreat on the phone. (more ) Share/E-mail

If you ve followed our advice to manage your personal brand online, you have your own web presence well underway by now. Congratulations, you ve followed us into a legal minefield. Such at least is the conclusion to be drawn from reading the excellent 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know that was recently posted at Aviva Directory. I thought I was following the online legal situation fairly closely, but some of this was news to me (for example, that the FTC is apparently digging into the whole murky business of paid product-related blog postings). Aviva also briefly covers (with links to deeper resources) such topics as deep linking, whether you can safely delete abusive comments, who owns Web 2.0 user-contributed content, the legality of thumbnailing images from other sites, spam laws, and journalism shield laws. (more ) Share/E-mail

The online world (or at least that corner of it where I hang out) has recently seen several incidents in which tempers flared rather quickly. I m starting to think that we re reaching a tipping point where our means of rapid communication have completely outstripped the social conventions that grew up in a slower time. If that s true, it could be especially troubling for web workers, who by our nature tend to live out on the cutting edge. The particular incidents that I m thinking of don t matter all that much except as examples. In one, well-known blogger Kathy Sierra went public about threats she d received, and a substantial chunk of blogdom was plunged into war. In the second, an employee of Twitter remarked about scaling issues they were having with Rails, and some people seized on this as an opportunity to attack the framework in general and to play let s you and him fight when David Heinemeier Hansson responded. In the third, Edelman PR guy Steve Rubel twittered an off-the-cuff remark about throwing copies of PC Magazine in the trash, and had to do some quick backpedaling when the editorial staff at PC Magazine noticed and threatened to cut off his clients from coverage. (more ) Share/E-mail

Music is at the core of a lot of peoples lives. Being able to listen to music on the go wherever you are is also extremely important. I for one find it an absolute must when pounding away at the keys of my computer. But what happens when you re on the road and don’t necessarily have access to your important music collection? That’s where MP3tunes new Oboe music locker can come into play. The new music locker has free unlimited music storage, and an unlimited streaming service with a web player that streams a user’s personal music library from within any IE of Firefox browser window. The Oboe Sync software syncs up the users Oboe locker with their PC music collection, along with album artwork, allowing users to enjoy their music collection wherever they are. Not only can Oboe be accessed with any computer that is connected to the internet, it can also be accessed via web-enabled devices. If you choose not to listen to music in your browser and prefer to use your trusty Winamp or iTunes music players, thankfully you can do that as well. To do this, you require a special media plug-in that MP3tunes offers for download. For instance, if you wish to stream into iTunes, you need the Oboe for iTunes Media Player plug-in [available for Mac or PC] and version 6.0 or newer iTunes. Once the plug-in has been installed, you can instantly start using your iTunes to listen to your streaming remote music library through the Shared Music panel. The free version of Oboe has unlimited space in your music locker. The unlimited storage for $39.95 allows users to store music that is up to 50MB each, backs up DRM tracks, shows album art, and takes off all advertising from the online player.

Our previous post on using Amazon S3 storage service as a personal back-up option was quite popular. Though many pointed out that backing to that service wasn t all that easy. Jeremy Zawodny has come up with a list of popular tools to help you with all that. Of the lot, the best one from ease of use standpoint seems to be JungleDisk. Still, if you don t want to deal with the hassle and are looking for simple solutions, AOL, Box.Net and quite a few other services offer upto 5 GB storage for free. There are some file size restrictions, but hey, they are free. On the paid side of things, Joseph Scott finds that Dreamhost is actually a better deal than S3, especially if you are dealing in huge amounts of data. Not sure if they are as reliable as S3, so you might have to make that call. I am currently using this new product offering from Joyent: Bingo Disk which gives you 100 GB of disk available via WebDAV for $199/year. No restrictions. I think it is something worth trying out. And if you do, use the code gigaom during the check-out process as Promo Code and you get $20 off the first year.

Niall Kennedy and I got together shortly before I left for NY to record our latest podsession - which is all about little hacks that can help virtual companies, virtual workers and well pretty much anyone who is building a business. We are sharing some of those hacks in the podcast, and if you have some of your own, let me know. (Podcast is available for download here.) My favorite hack is well - get a T-Mobile blackberry if you need email on the go. Why? Because it can take in your IMAP email and basically sync the status of messages - read, unread or deleted back to your server. Others can try Seven Mail on their Treo or Nokia E61, which does precisely that. You don t need Exchange server. Niall recommends: I recommend ProCare for businesses with multiple computers as a way to skip lines and get better service from Apple for everything from logic board repairs to training new employees on productivity applications. Amazon Prime is a good way to share Internet shopping efficiency between up to 5 co-workers.