Many web workers are remote collaborators, and if you’re like me, e-mail and online storage sites are among your primary collaboration tools. If you share a lot of files, folders and screenshots with others, take a look at a freeware application called Clip2Net. It lets you select an area of your desktop and upload it online in an instant. You receive a link to the image and also code to use for publishing the image on a blog or site. Uploading files and folders to share is also very fast and easy.
Clip2Net is all about speed. Historically, for example, when I’ve wanted to publish an image from my screen to the web I’ve reached for an image capture tool such as IrfanView, then I save the file I’ve captured locally, and then I might upload it using a service such as Flickr. Clip2Net anticipates that these steps go together, and eliminates the need for multiple applications.
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According to a post on the Google Docs Blog, Google Gears, a Firefox extension that enables users to create and edit files without an Internet connection, will bless Google Docs with offline access in the coming weeks. The rollout will begin today with a small number of users.
At first launch, word processing documents can be read and edited in offline mode, while spreadsheets will only be able to be read (but not edited). Support for Google Presentations is in the pipeline and will not be initially available. Naturally, collaboration on documents that have been created offline will not be available until the new document has been synced when the user comes back online. On a related note, it is currently unclear how smooth reconciliation of offline documents will be.
Google Documents has been in dire need of offline access in order to realistically compete other office suites including Microsoft Office and Zoho. Users of office productivity suites don’t always has connectivity to the Internet.
Currently, the only Google product to use Google Gears is Google Reader allowing for offline access to RSS news items. Google is not first in offering offline access of productivity apps through Google Gears, having been beaten to market by Zoho and Remember The Milk.
Google Gears for Google Docs will require Internet Explorer 6 and above or FireFox 1.6 and above (not including Firefox Beta 3) on Windows, Mac, and Linux. There is currently no support for other browsers including Safari, Flock, Opera, or the various mobile browsers.
Independent web workers have many challenges to deal with, including deciding what technology to focus on. Make the wrong decision, and the market can leave you behind. Now job search engine SimplyHired has put together a little application to make guessing just a tiny bit easier. Their employment trends page lets you graph the number of job listings by keyword from their sizeable database over the past couple of years. Want to know whether perl or python is more popular with employers? Curious about whether it’s easier to telecommute in Boston or Atlanta? Type in a couple of search terms and find out.
Of course, you can’t take the data as absolute truth (after all, they don’t index every job opening, and the keyword you’re looking for might not even be in the ad for the perfect job for you), and for some niches the numbers are more noise than signal. But it’s certainly a more useful tool for picking hot markets than just guessing.
(Graph data provided by SimplyHired.com, a search engine for jobs.)
While a picture is often worth a thousand words, being able to marry your words to your pictures or video and letting anyone you want add their words effortlessly makes VoiceThread a unique and powerful tool.
With VoiceThread, you start with a image – it might be your company’s new org chart, your dad’s picture when he was in the war, your webcam, an video you made or a video on the web. Then you annotate it with either text or more interestingly, your voice, from your Mac or PC. Then you decide to share your VoiceThread explicitly with your chosen online family and friends, or let the whole world come in and add their comments.
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Web workers on the go live and die by connectivity. In the olden days this used to mean finding a spare ethernet drop at your client’s office, but fortunately, we’ve advanced since then. Now we get the bulk of our connectivity over the air using a variety of technologies.
While there are plenty of devices using things like EDGE and EVDO to tap in through the phone network, in most cases finding wireless connectivity means just one thing: finding an open Wi-Fi hotspot and hooking up to it. But how do you find those hotspots? There are more ways than you might be aware of; here are 14 of them.
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WordPress, the open source blog management software, has released version 2.5 of their popular web application. WordPress has been quickly adopted because it presents a very flexible and easy to manage web publishing system. Out of the box it is a fully functional blog management system, but can also be used as a content management system (CMS) for a website as well.
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Mashups ahoy! WhitePages.com, which has name, address, and phone number data for 180 million people in the US, has opened up a RESTful API to give access to anyone. If you can handle writing a RESTful query (or use one of the mashup engines that takes care of the details for you), you can do phone lookups, reverse phone lookups, and address lookups using their data. It’s one more step towards convergence for all of us, and opens prospects for the savvy web worker to enhance any application that deals with people.
There’s a developer portal with all the details, as well as news of a contest: they’re looking for the best iPhone application and best social networking application using their API. MacBooks or flat screen TVs await the winners.
The New York Times, in a story based largely on information from marketing research firm Insight Media, is predicting a coming wave of tiny digital projectors – microprojectors – hitting the shelves by the end of this year. Insight’s own site goes on to say that they expect the market for these devices, and even smaller projectors built into cell phones and similar devices (“picoprojectors”) to hit 30 million units by 2012.
The basic idea is that advances in lasers and LEDs are making it possible to build into a small device – say, the size of a large cell phone – something that can project a picture a couple of feet when there’s light in the room, or on to the wall in a dark room. So, if you’re out to lunch with a prospective investor, you can whip out your iPhone and your microprojector and give your presentation, with slides, right on the tablecloth.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
