Web Worker Daily

It’s been about a year and a half since Microsoft first unveiled their suite of applications and portals rolled up under the live.com umbrella. Here at Web Worker Daily we’re Google-biased. We admit it. Why? For starters, many of us web workers prefer browsers like Firefox, Safari and Opera and operating systems like Mac OS X and Linux. Microsoft isn’t known for being particularly friendly to those tools.

One point consistently in favor of Microsoft is that their applications don’t always need an active Internet connection. The lines blur today as Google announces Google Gears, going into previously uncharted territory for Google…unplugged.

Is it game over for Microsoft, or are there parts of the live.com universe to take seriously for those of us not building our working lives around Windows and/or Internet Explorer?

Maybe.

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We’ve written before about the benefits of an afternoon “power nap” in helping you get through the day and attack problems with renewed energy. But some folks have trouble getting to sleep in a limited time slot. For reluctant nappers, the downloadable application pzizz promises help. It runs on either Windows or Mac systems, and I had a chance to give it a spin this week.

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What will your job as a web worker look like in 2015? Yes, it’ll still encompass digital devices, a multitude of communications technologies and social networking. But it may also offer a 20-hour work week, according to Gartner research director Brian Prentice.

In a new report Prentice envisions a world in which a free agent world composed of retiring baby boomers, working-age moms and Gen Xers relinquish traditional work structures in favor of “less-time” roles. This is good news, since those who work part-time are happier than those working full-time — the better to balance work and life among personal, family and community responsibilities.

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Mobile phones are not ideal for surfing the web and yet they have their advantages. They’re portable and cheap plus most of us carry them with us all the time. Might we be looking towards a world where lightweight devices with small screens provide our default connection to the web?

A study commissioned by T-Mobile found that mobile phones provide employees with the ability to connect to the world outside their cubicle even when management restricts access to social networking, web-based email, and other non-work-related websites. Here’s where a mobile phone’s portability comes in most handy — 15% of those surveyed even confessed to mobile browsing in the bathroom.

In response to the T-Mobile study, Jeremy Wagstaff suggests that mobile browsing is the future:

History will find it weird, not that we connect to the Web on the john with a device once designed to make phone calls, but that for 15 years we had to do that via a big hunk of metal, plastic and wires sitting in the middle of what used to be a big open space called a desk.

Do you surf the web on your mobile phone? What sites do you visit from your tiny screen? Do you foresee a day when you will do most of your surfing on a phone rather than a PC?

Telepresence World is next week. Telepresence, for those who haven’t experienced it, refers to videoconferencing that renders the “remote participants life-size, with fluid motion, accurate flesh-tones and flawless audio.” This isn’t the rinky-dink stuff that you do with a webcam and a copy of your favorite instant messenger application, but the stuff that’s going on at Fortune 1000 corporations with rooms full of fancy hardware installed on the other side of imposing solid-wood conference tables.

Cisco is making a major push in this area, and there are a number of well-funded smaller companies with hardware for sale today. Setting up telepresence-connected meeting rooms isn’t the stuff of science fiction these days, but simply a matter of finding the appropriate budget, and that budget is getting less astronomical all the time.

You’d think this stuff, offering another means of rich communication across long distances, would be a natural for web workers. And yet, I wonder.

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Britanyj Crimson earned 34,000 dollars last month online through the sale of jewelry she designed and created herself. That doesn’t include what her shop took in as donations for Relay For Life. Not bad for a business that didn’t exist before February 2007.

Britanyj is selling her wares on Second Life, and those Linden dollars translate to only about $120 in US dollars at current market rates. But for Dana Jones, the first world Web developer behind Second Mirage (the name of the jewelry shop), that revenue covers the expenses of what has become a rather pricey hobby. She projects that it could become a sideline business for her by the end of the year if she continues having sales growth akin to what she saw in April. (Full disclosure: Jones is the wife of WWD contributor Mike Gunderloy.)

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I didn’t enter a picture of my space in the Web Worker Flickr pool yet. The absolute mess of cable behind my 23″ Apple Studio Display and MacBook Pro is too embarrassing to share with the world right now. Bluetooth headsets, Blackberry and an iPod all competing for precious outlet space. What’s worse, when it’s time to take the show on the road all those power adapters and chargers add more weight to my shoulder bag than my computer does. With that in mind, CallPod’s Chargepod is drool-worthy, even at a rather steep $49.95 (plus $9.95 per adapter tip after the first one).

The Chargepod seems to be a nice companion to LaCie’s Hub. At a price, of course: $79.99.

How do you deal with cable clutter without shelling out for these pricey space-age organizers?

One of the enduring problems of web work is how to coordinate far-flung teams. Huddle is one of the more recent entrants in the team collaboration tool space. Every product has a different take as to what this space involves; in the case of Huddle, documents and scheduled tasks are at the center of things.

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