Web Worker Daily

There are a lot of professions where continuing education is an absolute necessity. For professionals providing financial or legal services, for instance, it’s often a legal requirement to take a class every year or two. Even if it isn’t legally required, though, continuing education can be very useful. It allows you to stay up to speed in your field, which can be an important deciding factor if you’re trying to get hired by a new employer or want to take on a new type of project. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know about you, but every time I go to a conference or trade show, after about an hour I’m getting a headache from overstimulation: Too much shiny stuff and bad lighting. Crowds. My face hurts from smiling at the poor booth people while they do their pitches. My feet hurt. And why is there never enough air? So when I had the chance to “attend” my first virtual conference a couple of weeks ago, I jumped at it.

One of the things I do is translation and, like all of the translators I know, I have a profile on ProZ.com. This year is the site’s 10th anniversary and, to celebrate, it held its first virtual conference on International Translation Day. It was free, and I signed up, even though I knew I wouldn’t get any free pens out of it. Read the rest of this entry »

So, you’re back home from that conference, and all that is left to do is to relax and enjoy your swag, right? Maybe not. To make the most of your conference experience, your work should be just beginning when you unpack that suitcase.

If you made the most of your time at the conference, you made a lot of new contacts and expanded on old ones. When you get home, it is time to start carrying those relationships into the future. And when an event is fresh in your mind is also when you need to evaluate your experience to decide what worked and what didn’t about it.

There are four main follow-up tasks to complete after a conference to ensure that the benefits of the conference continue long after the event is done. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s tempting to view a trade show trip as time out of the office to play, especially since many conferences are in vacation destinations like Las Vegas or Orlando. Yet with proper preparation, attending a trade show can be some of the most valuable work time you spend. We’ve previously covered the more practical aspects of conference preparation, but preparing your strategy for the trip is just as important as knowing what to pack.

Know Why You Are Attending

First up in your strategic planning is to decide exactly why you are going to attend the event. You need to set goals about what you would like to accomplish at the conference. Depending on the event, there are many possible goals you could have, including: Read the rest of this entry »

Every year when I make my yearly geek pilgrimage to Austin for SXSW, I struggle with how much time to spend at BarCampAustin vs. SXSW, because they usually overlap. I love attending SXSW, but I am also a BarCamp fan, so the choice is always a difficult one. This year, like most past years, I chose to skip SXSW to spend a day at BarCamp.

Previously on WebWorkerDaily, I talked about the differences in they way that the community conferences are organized and posted an interview with Audrey Eschright, a BarCamp and unconference organizer. This time I was interested in differences in content between traditional conferences and community-organized events.

Since anyone can propose a session at BarCamp, you tend to get more crazy ideas and niche sessions with great information that would never have an audience broad enough to justify a session at most traditional commercial conferences. You also get some terrible sessions and ideas that just don’t make much sense, but the beauty of BarCamp is that you can wander in and out of sessions pretty easily.

Some examples of interesting sessions at BarCampAustin included: How to start an online bacon business in a month, half-baked entrepreneurial theater (where people come up with crazy business ideas), air ships and more. Read the rest of this entry »

South by Southwest 2009, one of the largest and most widely-covered technology and Internet conferences of the year (and that’s to say nothing of the music and film portions!) is fast approaching. While many industry insiders will attend in person, SXSW will also be widely covered across a wide swath of mainstream media news web sites, blogs, YouTube, Qik, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Tumblr, posterous and just about every other social media publishing platform that you can think of!

Here’s a guide to the SXSW 2009 Interactive panels that web workers worldwide should look out for.

Friday, March 13th

My Boss Doesn’t Get It: Championing Social Media to the Man — A major and ongoing challenge/opportunity for web workers is to prove-by-example the power of social media.

GameChangers – Improvisation for Business in the Networked World — This panel covers improving “teamwork, creativity, flexibility and problem-solving skills”: essential for every web worker!

Read the rest of this entry »

Though the second edition of Going Solo – a conference for freelancers, planned for September – was cancelled, organizer Stephanie Booth pressed ahead and hosted a BarCamp-style unconference, SoloCamp.

Though I was only able to attend the opening sessions with around twenty participants, the initial session to shape the day’s agenda revealed some useful and interesting topic areas for freelancers and indie workers.

Participants collectively decided to divide the day into four one-hour sessions, each moderated by a volunteer and intended to draw out the room’s collective knowledge and experience in each area. This generally resulted in sprawling mind-maps, that helped both to drive and document the discussions… Read the rest of this entry »

One of our more popular articles is A Conference Survival Guide for the Web Worker – full of tips on how to pay for, pack for, and get the most out of one of the many conferences out there. But what if there was an even easier way to attend a conference: by sitting in front of your computer? That’s the proposition behind vConferenceOnline, which is putting on a big purely-online conference for SSWUG in November.

The vConference site goes to some length to contrast their offering with a traditional webcast. They’re using professional video production to actually broadcast conference sessions with full audio & video, instead of requiring phone dial-in for the audio portion. They also make conference sessions available to attendees in on-demand fashion after they’re first broadcast, so you can revisit a session to take better notes or check out a point you don’t quite remember.

Read the rest of this entry »