Web Worker Daily

This week has been a bit of a challenge. I’ve been haggling with car dealerships over purchasing a new car. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how frustrating that process has been, but I will say that I’m surprised at the customer service lessons I’m getting out of the experience. Read the rest of this entry »

LessConf is an event for marketers, designers, coders, business people, freelancers and anyone who wants to be inspired by amazing business people. It has a stellar speaker lineup that includes the likes of Gary Vaynerchuk (founder, Wine Library TV), Derek Sivers (founder, CD Baby), Mike McDerment (founder, FreshBooks) and Kevin Hale (founder, Wufoo). The conference is being held in Jacksonville, Fl., on Saturday, Oct. 17th.

Thanks to the kind folks at Less Everything, we have three tickets to give away to WebWorkerDaily readers. For a chance of winning, simply email contests@webworkerdaily.com, letting us know which of the speakers at LessConf you’d most like to meet and why — the best three answers submitted by midnight PT, Monday, Oct. 5th will win a free pass.

Earlier this week, Meryl reviewed WinAutomation, a package that lets you automate many of the routine tasks you do every day on Windows PCs. The kind folks at WinAutomation have offered us three copies of the Professional Edition of the tool, worth $199 each, to give away to WebWorkerDaily readers. To get a chance to win, leave a comment below, letting us know how you would use automation to improve your productivity and reduce wasted time. The best three answers (as selected by WinAutomation’s Jag Foo) will win a WinAutomation 3.0 Professional Edition license. Entries close midnight PDT, Sunday, August 8, and we’ll announce the winners next week.

I read about a study over the weekend that suggests the number of competitors can impact our motivation to compete. The researchers found that with a small number of competitors, people had increased motivation to compete, but even with equal chances of success, our motivation can drop when we are faced with large numbers of competitors.

“The simple act of comparing yourself against someone else can stoke the fires of competition. When there are just a few competitors around, making such comparisons is easy but they become more difficult when challengers are plentiful. As a result, the presence of extra contenders, far from spurring us on by adding extra challenge, can actually have the opposite effect. Garcia and Avishalom call this the “N-effect” and they demonstrated it through a number of experiments.” – Ed Yong

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Crowdsourcing is a relatively recent workplace trend that isn’t going away.

On the one hand, it definitely generates healthy competition, and companies stand to win out in a big way when service providers and freelancers are openly vying for your dollar. We’ve looked at some examples in the past, like 99 designs, a site where designers enter competitions to win contracts.

InnoCentive has a different take on crowdsourcing.

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