I think project management books should be on every web worker’s reading list because — like it or not — even if your job title isn’t “project manager,” you still have to manage your own portion of the projects you participate in. Even some informal grounding in project management can be helpful for those “rare” times you are pulled into help bring a failing project back to life.

“97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know,” edited by Barbee Davis, pulls together useful project management tips and insights from working project managers without the dry academic style found in many project management books, making it a great instructional read for web workers seeking to hone their PM skills.

The format of the book includes 97 tips; here are some takeaways the book has for web workers:

• “Use a Wiki” reinforces the need to centralize access to project information. While this is pretty standard for many web workers, there are employers and clients who still need reinforcement on this point. This tip provides two solid pages of wiki advice and tips that should even be digestable and and understandable to even a non-technical decision maker.
• “We Have Met the Enemy…and He Is Us” should ring true to readers who have been on projects fraught with too many meetings, multicultural/multilingual project teams, conflicting work styles, and methodologies. The advice to keep an open mind in these situations is simple yet speaks volumes as to how a web worker can survive and even thrive in these situations.
• “Aggressively Promote Communication in Distributed Projects” boils down the reality of  communications challenges that may present themselves in geographically dispersed project teams including time overlap management, communications strategy and logistics.
• “Every Project Manager is a Contract Administrator,” while directed at working project managers also provides useful advice to web workers for mitigating such contractual issues like undocumented changes and the need to control changes within the specifications of the contract.
• “9.7 Reasons I Hate Your Website” made me chuckle but reminded me of how some companies don’t understand the differences between software development and web development.

These are just a few of the standout tips in the book. While it is directed more towards a software development audience, I recommend it to any web worker who wants to be more conversant in project management and its challenges.

The book is available directly from O’Reilly Media or from Amazon.com.

Share your favorite project management tips below.

There’s no shortage of free learning materials available online for both new and experienced freelancers. While you can turn to hundreds of articles and blog posts, there’s nothing like reading a longer, more comprehensive book to really get some insight on a particular topic.

Here’s a collection of some great downloadable PDFs, e-books and manifestos:

Freelancing and Teleworking

Go Freelance

Leif Kendall’s “Go Freelance” is an introductory guide to the world of freelancing. You’ll go through the process of preparing yourself for the leap to the freelance world, finding work, networking and setting rates. If you’ve been freelancing for while, some of Kendall’s advice might seem elementary. But if you’re a new freelancer or about to become one, you can easily learn the basics from this e-book.

A Human’s Guide to Freelance Living

Unlike the nuts-and-bolts guide listed above, this PDF from Charlie Pabst focuses on productivity and work habits. As practicing freelancers know, these things are just as important as business skills.

Business Tips

Your Business Brickyard

Howard Mann’s guide strips away the non-essentials of business building, allowing you to “go back to the brickyard” and start with the fundamentals. It’s a useful book if you’re encountering problems with your business. On the first reading, I was able to take a long, honest look at my own freelancing practice and spot several weaknesses. There’s also an accompanying goal-setting worksheet you can download.

Getting Real

“Getting Real” from 37signals (the company behind the popular project management app, Basecamp) may be about building web apps, but many of the ideas are applicable to almost any kind of freelancing endeavor — especially if you find yourself working with a group. This e-book is free to read online, but if you prefer to read it as a printed book or downloadable PDF, you’ll have to buy it.

100 Ways to Help You Make Money

Although the title sounds gimmicky, the advice contained in this guide by management guru Tom Peters is practical. It includes points on thanking your clients, getting up early and finding your story. At over 60 pages, this book is much longer than most of the guides in this collection, so you might want to read this in small doses over a few days.

Improving Your Web Presence

The Simple Web

For anyone who has ever wanted more from their blog or web site, Skellie recommends that you evaluate each element based on four categories — Gripping, Resonating, Interacting and Talking. As the name implies, the ideas in this guide are simple and easy to implement.

Killer Flagship Content

This is required reading for anyone with a professional blog. In this e-book, Chris Garrett talks about the importance of compelling blog posts, the “flagship” content that will be the core of your blog. (Note: a feed subscription is required to download the book)

Rockstar Personal Branding

If you’re new to personal branding, this free download provides a clear, actionable introduction. Throughout the guide, Skellie asks some simple yet compelling questions that can help anyone form their brand, be they generalists or specialists. Other topics include how to craft your personal elevator pitch and how to leverage blogging for your brand. (Note: a newsletter subscription is required to download the book.)

Inspiration

The Liberation Manifesto

In this guide, Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind lists the reasons why you should liberate yourself from the cubicle-bound lifestyle. Mead provides an inspirational boost to aspiring teleworkers, particularly if they have a rebellious streak. A recommended read for those who can’t seem to push themselves to take the first step.

How to be Creative

Hugh MacLeod, best known for his business card cartoons over at Gapingvoid.com, compiled this honest, straightforward collection of blog posts on what it takes to be creative. It’s worth reading over and over again, especially when you’re feeling uninspired or frustrated with your work.

Have you read or made any e-books that you’d like other WWD readers to know about? Share them with us in the comments.

Image by lusi from sxc.hu

Earlier this month, O’Reilly Media published its latest title in the “Missing Manuals” series, Josh Clark’s “iWork ‘09: The Missing Manual.” It throws a spotlight on Apple’s office suite, with how-to guides for the Pages word processor, the Numbers spreadsheet and the Keynote presentation app.

Even as a devoted Apple user, no matter how much I want to, I can’t quite make the psychological break from Microsoft Office. I’ve nothing against the software giant’s office suite — even the 2008 Mac edition I use is a great collection of software, although it is perhaps a little over-featured,  lacking the intuitive web collaboration of Google Docs and not quite as elegantly Mac-native as I’d like.

Apple’s iWork ‘09 fares no better on web collaboration than Microsoft’s offering, but it’s certainly more Mac-native and tantalizingly low-priced, though it’s not as full-featured and lacks tutorials for new users switching from Office.

As expected, the book steps through the application’s regular features but puts a surprising emphasis on design and aesthetics. The title’s broadly divided into three sections — focusing on Pages, Numbers and Keynote, respectively — with each section roughly breaking down into creating and editing, layout, themes and templates, and sharing. It’s a  well put together tour of the suite, providing an overview of basics, with some hints and tips and coverage of more advanced functionality. There are few other books around that provide an objective (i.e., non-Apple) coverage of iWork, and in that regard, it’s a good overview.

However, even after an afternoon spent with iWork ‘09 and Clark’s book, I’m still drawn to Microsoft Office. As elegant and as powerful as iWork is, the near ubiquity of Microsoft’s suite means that I feel my time is better spent understanding the ins and outs of a product where my investment in skilling up is more likely to yield more portable and transferable skills.

“iWork ‘09: The Missing Manual” is a great title for acclimatizing yourself with Apple’s lovely working environment, but I can’t help but think iWork will remain a niche application suite in the face of Microsoft’s de facto standard.

Let us know what you think of the iWork office suite in the comments.

Maybe I’m biased towards writing-related topics because of my background and personal projects, but I also think good writing is one of the most important cornerstones of good business, and therefore useful in any line of web work. One of the best ways to improve any kind of writing is to read as much as possible. BookGlutton is a free (ad-supported) tool that can help you not only read more, but read better, in a context that emphasizes social interaction.

Any professional who uses writing in any capacity can benefit from getting another set of eyes on their work, and from looking critically at the work of others in similar fields.

BookGlutton can simplify that process by bringing it to the web. It seems primarily designed to cater to people wanting to set up an online book club, but as users can upload their own original works for shared reading, there’s nothing stopping us from using it as a collaborative work tool as well.

The built-in library at BookGlutton leans strongly towards public domain titles for which the copyright has expired, for obvious reasons. Reading and commenting on these works with a group of peers will probably help to improve your writing skills, but I’ll concentrate on its use for gathering feedback on your own work for the purposes of this overview. As is always the case when it comes to sharing work with other professionals, there’s always the worry of revealing valuable IP, but I still recommend a peer review process whenever possible.

The only formats BookGlutton’s upload function supports currently are ePub, HTML, and HTML+ZIP (Zipped HTML files). That means to get my work on the site, I had to use Word’s “Save As Web Page” command to get my .doc file ready for editing. Once uploaded, you can edit the work’s title, author, and description, and decide who to share it with.

My file had that aggravating problem of putting little question mark icons where quotes and apostrophes were, but otherwise the formatting translated well. Once you’re in reading mode, you can highlight text and “Mark” it, leaving comments that others can see and reply to, depending on who you chose to share them with.

The ability to see threaded discussions about any given passage is where BookGlutton shows its real potential as a tool for collaborative editing. You can’t do inline text changes, but for broad, big picture editorial work, this kind of commenting works much better than, say, track changes in a word processing program.

You can also chat in real-time if more than one user who has access to the work is logged in at once. The “Talk” window on the book’s left-hand side allows you to do this, and updates automatically when each user changes pages and/or highlights a new paragraph. This could be very useful if you’re lucky enough to be able to schedule live editing sessions.

Whether you’re a writer working online, or an online worker looking to improve your writing through feedback, BookGlutton is a web app with a lot to offer. It’s also been updated within the last couple of days, so even if you had a look before and weren’t too impressed, it might be worth a second glance.

I can’t wait to upload my endless volumes of memoirs and force my friends and family to read it with me and shower me with praise. And it better be praise.

Have you used BookGlutton, or a similar app, to get feedback on your writing? Share your thoughts in the comments.

One of the fancy terms that gets thrown around in Web 2.0 discussions is “disintermediation” – in other words, cutting out the middleman. Authonomy is a new site from Harper Collins that aims to do just that in the world of book publishing. If you’re a web worker with a book inside battling to get out – as so many of us are – it offers an alternative to the traditional ways of trying to break into publishing.

As anyone who has tried to get a book published knows, one of the biggest battles is to attract the attention of a publisher. If you don’t have some contacts on the editorial side, or a good agent, you can blindly send your manuscript around yourself – and likely it will sit in the “slush pile,” where, if you’re very lucky, someone might read it some day.

Authonomy cuts out the agents and editorial contacts by functioning as a sort of online slush pile combined with a social network. Anyone can join and upload a manuscript. At that point, members of the Authonomy community can read, comment on, and rate the prospective book. Though the site is a recent launch, there are already around 150 books to browse through and read online – ranging in quality from “simply dreadful” to “actually pretty good.”

But from the hopeful author’s point of view, the best part is this sentence from the site’s FAQ: “HarperCollins hopes to find new, talented writers we can sign up for our traditional book publishing programmes – once we’re fully launched we’ll be reading the most popular manuscripts each month as part of this search.”

Will this method of finding and publishing new writers succeed? It’s too soon to know; I don’t believe any Authonomy authors have been signed to a contract yet, though some manuscripts have been read by editors at Harper Collins. But for anyone who wants to extend their web work to include writing a book (and with National Novel Writing Month coming up, that will be a lot of people), the site offers a new avenue for getting attention that’s worth exploring.

The web change work in so many ways: where we can work, who we work with, how we work. Here are the books from 2007 that help define the ways the web changes work, from the practical to the theoretical. I’ve left out profession-specific book such as those on web design and development in favor of titles with more general appeal. Share your own favorite web-related books from 2007 in the comments.

Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet–Better, Faster, Easier by Mark Frauenfelder. Try this guide from Boing Boing co-founder Frauenfelder as your handbook to the web. The most advanced web users may find it’s mostly stuff they already know, but others will be happy to own such a wealth of web savvy all in one place.

Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day by Gina Trapani. This was published in late 2006, but wasn’t widely available until 2007. This gathers the best of Lifehacker tips and tricks with Lifehacker editor Trapani’s easy style. She makes it seem like anyone can manage their to do lists by command line, install an invisibility cloak in their web browser, and use text substitution to save time.

One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success by Marci Alboher. If one career or field is not enough, try slashing your work life. That means combines multiple jobs or businesses or income streams in ways that uniquely suit you. The web makes it a bunch easier to do that, because you can start up online businesses or market your offline work online. Alboher blogs at the New York Times on Shifting Careers.

Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success by Penelope Trunk. For career advice that’s brazen and brash and in your face, go with Penelope Trunk, either her book or her blog or both. You may not agree with everything she suggests, but her advice might shake you up — and that’s what web work is about, shaking up our work lives. Trunk also writes for Yahoo! Finance.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss. Few people working for a living can succeed on just four hours a week — Tim Ferriss included. Much of Ferriss’ advice comes down simply to “do less”: check your email less, read less, and spend less time at work to force yourself into efficiency, for example. But in amongst that you’ll find some helpful tips and ideas, like how to experiment with online entrepreneurship in a low-risk way.

Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing by Lois Kelly. Gone are the days when marketing could be left to everyone else. As a web worker — whether cubicle-based employee or cafe-going freelancer — you need to know how to market yourself and any services and products you offer. Marketing consultant Kelly’s book is an easy read and a great starting point for the way marketing is changing in the web age. Kelly blogs at Bloghound, the blog that goes with her marketing company Foghound.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The web is a world of people and ideas. You need to know how to connect with people and you need to know how to make your ideas compelling. The brothers Heath help with the latter, telling you about the “curse of knowledge” and why you need to make your ideas concrete and credible. The book is based on Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Chip Heath’s research.

The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun. Berkun makes hash of the conventional wisdom about innovation in this engaging and crisply-edited book. Among the myths he topples: that your boss knows more than you about innovation, that there’s a step-by-step method you can follow to innovate, and that people love new ideas. Berkun’s blog is required reading if you’re interested in creativity and managing people. Check out some of his creativity hacks if your thinking is feeling stale.

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. In the digital age, our old ways of managing and classifying information don’t work. Sometimes rambling, often brilliant, this book will change the way you think about how you approach the ocean of information online and how it organizes itself. Weinberger blogs at Joho the blog and is well known as one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle. Ogle’s book brings together network theory with a wealth of examples of how the world of ideas thinks for itself. The web brings us into closer touch with this smart world. It’s a big book with some complex ideas, but totally worth reading if you like the theoretical side of things.

If you like these books, you might also like Web Worker Daily’s book Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working, now available for pre-order on Amazon. It’ll be coming out in January, right when you might be thinking about how to take your work life to a whole new place using the web. It covers the trends underpinning the web work shift and will help you figure out your place in the web working world.

While the news of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader could signal a changing trend in the way that readers consume their information, unremarked upon is how the rise of the e-book reader will eventually change the world for writers.

If readers can download books into their Kindle (or Sony Reader), what’s to stop them from cutting out the middleman and downloading directly from an author?

What’s happening to the news media (blogs vs. newspapers) and music (free downloads vs. buying a CD) and video (YouTube or downloads vs. buying a DVD) will happen with novels: the middleman will become unnecessary.

Currently, it is extremely difficult to get a novel published. A novelist might spend a few months writing a great novel, and then submit his manuscript to a bunch of publishers (or hire an agent to do it for him). He’ll most likely be rejected completely by all of them, because publishers get thousands and thousands of submissions, and can only print a handful. If a novel is accepted by a publisher, there’s a long process of editing, layout and design, marketing, and so forth, just to get the book into print, into bookstores, and into the hands of the readers.

Consider the electronic version of this process: an author writes a book (and preferably has it edited) … and sells it to you via his website. So much easier! Sure, Stephen King experimented with this unsuccessfully in the past, but there wasn’t a market then. In a few years, there might be.

So let’s take a look at Amazon’s business model with the new Kindle e-book reader: publishers will give them an electronic version of the book, and Amazon will re-sell it for $9.99. That’ll still limit most people to a few purchases a month.

But take a look at the blogging model: we give our writing and information away for free. Sure, there are millions of bloggers giving away their writing for free, because anyone can do it. Bloggers, then, have learned that to get attention and readership, they have to learn to differentiate themselves, with quality and usefulness and value. They still make money, if they can do that, but they don’t charge the reader for each post.

Will novelists eventually give their novels away for free? Only time will tell. I’m betting that those novelists who can’t get accepted by a publisher will definitely give away their content for free. I bet there are a lot of great novelists out there who don’t get published. Soon, the publishers and Amazon will be competing with free novels, and it’s only a matter of time before major authors cut out the publishers and Amazon and sell their books themselves, perhaps for half price (still getting more than they do with the current setup).

The e-book reader removes the need for a publisher and bookstore. The author, then, becomes the only important element in the business, and rightfully so.

Ultimately, the market will determine what happens, and which business model will win out, but I’m betting on the blog model: people are less likely to pay for newspapers and magazines if they can get great stuff on blogs for free.