Web Worker Daily

In an effort to better understand the inner workings of a coworking business, I spoke with Eva Schweber, co-owner of CubeSpace in Portland, Ore. Schweber is CubeSpace’s Chief Cat Herder, policy wonk and fount of obscure nonprofit information. She brings more than 15 years of collaborative facilitation and organizational management experience to her numerous paid and volunteer gigs. Her professional experience runs the gamut from managing an artisan goat dairy (she was a state-certified pasteurizer) to facilitating a strategic planning effort by an international environmental consortium. Her esoteric background has trained her well for running a coworking community.

In her spare time, Schweber serves on the Mayor’s Economic Recovery Cabinet and chairs the Small Business Development Workgroup of the City of Portland’s Small Business Advisory Council. She also sits on the City Club of Portland’s Research Board and in June 2007 was appointed by Governor Ted Kulongowski to serve on Oregon’s Commission for Voluntary Action and Service. Her blog is her attempt to reconcile her ever-growing interest in small business with her wonkish tendencies.

WWD: Why did you decide to open a coworking space in Portland?

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Often it’s the (seemingly) simple applications that turn out to be the most powerful, and the most popular. Twitter is a great example of this.

Ping.fm, a service that allows you to easily update a host of social networking and social media profiles all at once, seeks to resolve the headache of needing to log into multiple accounts to send the same message to different groups of friends and contacts all over the Internet.

While for some Ping.fm may just be a nice little time-saving utility, for social media and online marketing professionals, this service may well be a killer app.

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Some years ago a web designer asked me if I thought it was right for him to design a site for a religious group whose values he completely disagreed with. “The site is actively promoting their beliefs,” he said, “and I’m not sure I want to be a part of that.”

I was reminded of his dilemma last week, when a potential client contacted me to ask if I could write sales copy for his multilevel marketing scheme — at twice my usual fee. After doing a bit of research on the company, however, it became apparent that this person was running a scam.

As freelancers, we sometimes get requests that we find shady. These can range from the above examples to creating promotional materials for companies whose ethics we don’t completely agree with. How do we deal with these requests? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m dissatisfied with the current crop of “lifestreaming” apps. Overall, I think they’re missing a huge opportunity to help users focus their limited attention to the content that really matters.

Last week, for example, Simon covered the release of skimmer, a desktop client that brings together notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other services. Also recently launched is Cosmic Machine’s EventBox, a Mac-only application that similarly mashes together notifications and messages from a range of web services: Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr and Reddit, as well as the capability to import raw RSS feeds.

Both skimmer and EventBox are pretty and pull a variety of web services into a single stream of information. But as a heavy user of multiple social networks and web apps, neither provides me with any real ability to manage the stream of information I get from all those web services. As far as I can tell, all they really do is to move noise from several separate sources into a single cacophony of content. There are some limited filters to fish out particular keywords from the stream, but nothing that I couldn’t use an RSS reader -– like Google Reader -– to replicate.

So here’s what I’d love to see from lifestreaming tools: Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping up with online conversations can be a daunting task. As a freelance consultant, I not only need to keep up with what people are saying about me and my company, but I also need to monitor the latest industry trends to learn new skills and stay relevant. While wearing my blogging hat, I also have to keep up with conversations that would be interesting to web workers for this blog, or relevant for people building online communities for my own blog.

Interesting conversations are happening all over the web, on blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and many other sites. People are talking about you, your company and your industry, and revealing many tips and tricks that you should know. I am a self-confessed data junkie, so I have a few tips to help you make sense of the massive amounts of data available and to focus on monitoring just what really matters. Read the rest of this entry »

Often a project team needs to be up and running without much lead time, and you don’t have the time or the inclination to come up with a customized, tailored solution for collaboration and file sharing.

There might be a lot of collaboration portal web applications out there, but few work as well or offer as simple a setup as Onehub. I’m not sure how long it took me to get everything ready, but I’m fairly sure that the same song was playing on iTunes when I finished as when I started. And no, my 40GB music library had not completely cycled.

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Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions vary, but for the most part they help businesses manage sales leads, accounts, campaigns, forecasts and activities. Most CRM packages tend to be too heavyweight for the sole proprietor, however. They cost a bundle and contain features that most web workers don’t need. Zoho has a relatively simple CRM solution that’s free for up to three users. Although it takes some figuring out, it’s a good option to consider for web workers.

Zoho CRM comes with all the basic CRM functions you’d expect: You can manage campaigns and leads, view reports and dashboards and manage inventory.

Getting Started

It’s best to start at CRM.zoho.com, even if you have an existing Zoho account. At first glance, the application looks overwhelming, especially if it’s the first CRM package you’ve used. Zoho has a useful Getting Started video that gives you a quick overview of the application and makes it feel less threatening.

Everything you need to access appears in the tabs at the top of the screen and the links below them. You can customize most of the reports and dashboards as well as the settings for every tab. Read the rest of this entry »

Most web workers are constantly adding new applications to their arsenals, and it’s common for our computers and mobile devices to become loaded with them over time. At the same time, many mobile devices these days can’t tolerate arrays of bloated applications. I’ve written before about PortableApps.com and MacLibre,  both of which deliver bushels of free, open source applications for Windows and Mac users. They’re especially good for putting applications on a USB thumb drive, where the applications are stripped down into light, portable versions. These downloads are also popular among netbook users, who often have limited local storage. Another site to keep in mind if anti-bloatware is an attraction is OldApps.com.

OldApps delivers exactly what its name implies: older versions of popular applications, where users may favor the older versions because of their smaller sizes, or their lack of complexity, or both. Here’s more on what the site offers, and what to be careful about.

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