Web Worker Daily

Last week, Sam explored trends in the technology jobs market, suggesting that significant opportunities only reveal themselves when examining both the available jobs and the underlying trends in demand for skills. Coincidentally, on the same day that Sam’s piece was published, The New York Times suggested that “the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.”

As the post-Web 2.0 notion of “Web Squared” (a smarter web extending into the real world through sensor applications) becomes reality, we will see a proliferation of data. Figures such as Google Chief Economist Hal Varian are predicting that statisticians will be the hot profession as their skills are increasingly in demand. Read the rest of this entry »

I love technology, but not when it comes to switching PCs — moving all the data and applications from one Windows machine to another is not always as easy as it could be.

I thought I’d share some tips gleaned from my latest move to a new desktop. My way isn’t necessary the best way, but it may give you some ideas when it comes time for you to make the switch. Here are the steps that I took.

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These days, when I leave my office — even if it’s just to go down the street to the grocery store — I know that I can grab my cell phone (a Treo 755p) and have my contacts, calendar, to-do list and passwords with me. They’ll even be up-to-date, if I’ve remembered to use Missing Sync to update my phone recently! And my email is always available, as I use IMAP with Google Apps.

Thanks to my smartphone, I don’t carry my laptop very much, unless I’m doing a presentation or going on an extended trip. But it’s nice to have my desktop sync with my laptop, so that it’s ready when I need it. And that’s where things start getting complicated. Read the rest of this entry »

I often need to remind myself that the way I use Twitter is probably not typical when considering the population as a whole. Like many of you, I am online most of the time: sitting at my computer or checking in with my iPhone when I’m away from the laptop. Since I’m always connected and usually working in some form or another, I read tweets frequently and post many times per day.

According to some new Twitter research published on the Harvard Business Blog, my usage is unusual: Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I admitted that I am an information junkie, and I wanted to follow up this week with a few tips for feeding your information habit by mining Twitter for information. Twitter tools are popping up like weeds lately, so rather than try to be comprehensive, I’m just going to highlight a few of my favorite tools for getting information out of Twitter.

Twitter Search

Twitter’s built-in search engine is probably my favorite way to find information in Twitter. It is great for quick searches to find specific pieces of information, watching trending topics, and persistent vanity searches for your name or company. While I do use the search engine to type in queries, the real power is in using RSS feeds for searches and running them through Yahoo Pipes for additional filtering. In many cases, I use Yahoo Pipes to loop through a series of keywords from a CSV file to search Twitter for each of those keywords and monitor the results as an RSS feed in my reader. I recently did a 2 minute video explaining exactly how to search twitter using Yahoo Pipes and a CSV file of keywords, so I won’t cover it in any more detail here. Read the rest of this entry »