Consider the universal mailbox. The concept of a single place to collect messages of all kinds has been buzzworthy for many years, but it’s never been implemented perfectly. There are universal mailbox applications, but they often include a fair amount of complexity and cost. Now, a new beta online application called Fuser is approaching the concept in a very simple way—focusing on letting you get e-mail from all your accounts in one place, and messages from your social networks in the same place.
I’ve been using Fuser, have added a number of my e-mail and social network accounts to it, and I am a fan. Although I initially balked at the idea of supplying all of my user names and passwords to one aggregator, the service is useful enough that I overcame these concerns.
Fuser keeps it simple. Unlike the many other universal mailbox concepts I’ve seen, which usually attempt to put voice mail, e-mail, and other types of messages altogether in one complicated view, Fuser just provides you an aerial view of your e-mail messaging engines, and the ability to check, send, delete and compose in one place.
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BNET has a great article on managing employees in remote locations that includes tips for building trust. Trust is key to the effective functioning of any team, whether distributed geographically or not. Fortunately, you don’t have to meet face to face to create and maintain trust with remote colleagues, especially with so many communications tools available online.
Here are BNET’s tips for building trust on virtual teams, with my web worker additions below.
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There seems to be an inevitable progression in the lives of many web workers: we get more and more overloaded with sites to update, things to do, systems to follow, interests to pursue, blogs to read…until something snaps and we have to reset our lives to a saner level once again. It’s easy to understand this pattern when you think about it: there are thousands of people out there building bright, shiny things for you to get interested in, and only one of you to be interested in them. To preserve your sanity, you need to set some limits on how much of the web world you try to absorb.
Over time, most web workers develop their own systems for cutting back their daily load on a gradual basis, so that they don’t have to throw everything out at once. Here are three proven strategies for getting your own overload back under control when you feel your free time vanishing under the strain: Read the rest of this entry »
Logging whatever is important to you can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, whether it’s logging the time you work on any project, online activities, spending, progress towards a goal, reading, exercise and food consumption, or anything really.
But developing the habit of logging can be intimidating or frustrating for many people who’ve tried it for a few days and failed.
Logging anything is a habit, and just like any other new habit, it can be a challenge to develop. But it doesn’t have to be difficult, and certainly not impossible.
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The world of online video is flourishing right now, to the point where web workers who can produce video content have unprecedented kinds of opportunities for reaching large audiences, and even getting paid. Mention online video to many people, and they think immediately of YouTube and other video sharing sites, but there are many different ways to promote your videos and earn revenues from them.
In this post, I’ll cover three good ways to get started doing commercial online video content. Whether you want to have your own online TV station, complete with paid advertisements, or just maximize your audience for occasional video efforts, there is help here.
Brightcove. A good initial place to start exploring if you want your online video content to reach good audiences is Brightcove. Like many of the other video sharing sites on the web, Brightcove allows you to post your videos and get them seen, but it goes well beyond that for video content that you want to commercialize and reach big audiences with.
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When social scientist Herbert Simon came up in 1971 with the concept later branded as “attention economics,” how could he have known that getting fly-by surfers to stop and pay attention would be the bane of existence for those of us cranking out content for one or another of the 135 million web sites that currently exist?
Getting information onto your site may be the easiest thing you have to tackle. How do you get people to pay attention?
The topic surfaced at a recent panel on writing about technology for consumers, co-hosted by Yahoo! and Media Bistro. The experts included journalists and editors from newspapers, magazines, web sites and television stations. In spite of the fact that the audience consisted of writers, editors and PR folks, the advice applies to anybody out to game the system to their advantage.
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Meetings–they never seem to stop, do they? If you grow weary of meetings and the travel that often goes along with them, or if you just want to investigate one of the coolest, free ways to collaborate with other people, give Yugma a try. It’s a free application, hosted on the web and Java-based, and it’s aimed at Windows, Mac and Linux users.
Like many of the other virtual meeting products, there are paid versions of Yugma in addition to the free version. However, many web workers will find that they have all they need in the free version. With the free version, you can invite up to 10 participants into a virtual meeting with you, share your desktops back and forth, whiteboard and annotate files, and when you set up a session, a free teleconferencing session and number are generated for you. Another very cool feature of Yugma is that you can embed it into your web site.
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CNET’s Caroline McCarthy welcomes the naked generation:
It’s no longer noteworthy to point out that there are hordes of Web users who are putting their lives online, from revealing “personality surveys” posted in pink Comic Sans MS on glittery MySpace profiles, to Flickr play-by-plays of the wildest Pi Beta Phi rush week since the invention of the digital camera. I’m not talking about them. The Naked Generation is something different: its figureheads are smart, business-savvy young adults, typically in emerging creative fields, who see the embarrassing antics of “MySpace kids” and their emotional outpourings, and see a window of opportunity. They’re smart, and they know it, so they think they can use online exhibition as an advantage rather than an embarrassment.
Maybe you could get ahead in your career by opening up your life online… or maybe one day you’ll regret blogging and videocasting and sharing every little burp, especially if it compromises your ability to win a job or a client.
Where do you draw the line in deciding how naked to get online? What advice would you give to those wondering how to balance privacy and transparency, especially in looking for career success?
