Whether you are an employee or a freelancer, you need to manage your personal brand. Of course you’ll think of using the web to do so. But does that mean shelling out money for search engine optimization, for pay-per-click ads that drive potential customers or employers to your website, for a professionally-designed website? Perhaps not, or at least not primarily, according to Tim Carter, who earns a six-figure income running his Ask the Builder website and selling ebooks on home building and remodeling.
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If you’re like most of us, you deal with piles of unstructured information every day: phone numbers, ideas for later consideration, snippets of information from the web, recipes, phone messages…the list is endless. For the web worker, moving this information into an online notebook can be an attractive proposition. Rather than tie yourself to one computer, or even one operating system, you can get at your notes from anywhere that has a web browser handy. Not surprisingly, there are a fair number of choices in this arena these days.
For this roundup, I stuck to online applications that let you save freeform notes in some sort of organized fashion for later use. I skipped over others that are primarily designed as tools to annotate web pages, such as noteClip, and bookmark managers like del.icio.us, BlueDot, and Chipmark.
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My name is Judi Sohn, and I’m a feed addict.
Every few months I whittle my collection down, only to see it creep back to its present level of 650+ feeds. I’ve tried desktop applications like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon (both now NewsGator products), but in the end I prefer a web-based reader. No extra applications running and my subscription list is in sync no matter which device or platform I’m using.
This week’s contenders are the most popular applications for keeping up with all those RSS feeds in a browser window: Bloglines, NewsGator Online and Google Reader.
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Life as an entrepreneurial web worker can be great - or it can be an absolute nightmare of overwork, missed deadlines, unsatisfied customers, and (in the worst case) lawsuits. Just having an idea or knowing how to write code isn’t enough for a successful online career. Here’s our selection of five ways to take that career nowhere in a hurry - and what to do about them.
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37signals’ online organizer tool, Backpack has been a favorite with GTD geeks and web workers for some time now. It’s sleek, it’s cool, it’s got all kinds of Ajaxy goodness. And it can be used in many different ways to make you more productive.
There are a million uses for Backpack, but what follows is a list of 10 productive uses for them. Why use Backpack? As a web worker, you need a tool that you can access any time, anywhere – not just from your home computer. And Backpack is a great tool because of its intuitive, easy-to-use interface. It’s also versatile and seriously useful.
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What we have here is a failure to communicate.
We’ve talked about how you can work with your friends. What happens when your colleague is someone you just don’t like? Maybe you have very different personalities or work styles. Maybe the project is falling behind because that person is not pulling his/her weight and you resent them for it. It’s great when you can hand-pick your team, but sometimes for whatever reason you’re stuck working with a person you would never add to your Friends list under any other circumstances.
Often, personality squabbles can dissipate when you’re forced to work through your problems face-to-face. But if your primary method of communication is email, IM, chatroom or message board the most minor disagreements can quickly mushroom into big drama. Who needs that?
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One of the big challenges of running a web site has always been figuring out how successful it is. For years, most of us did this by analyzing the information in web server logs using one of many statistical packages on the market. More recently, Google Analytics has captured a fair chunk of this business with its off-site analytical tools. But even after its recent redesign, the Google Analytics interface can be overwhelming and confusing, and some people are growing wary of shipping more and more of their data off to Google’s servers. Enter Reinvigorate, a new set of analytical tools initially aimed at the blogging market but suitable for any web site.
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