I came across this very interesting BusinessWeek article by Stephen Baker last week, which discusses how willing we are to do free work online, without even trying to receive monetary compensation for our efforts. Instead, he argues, we’re looking for different kinds of payback.
The non-monetary rewards most people who do these kinds of things, which include answering questions on Yahoo! Answers and finding weird buys to post to ThisNext.com, consist of things that we valued before we valued money, including praise and admiration.
For businesses and institutions hoping to use this massive emerging voluntary force to drive their own goals, the difficulty lies in determining just what it is that’s motivating people, and developing a rewards system accordingly. The difficulty is that much of the reward seems to be community-based, i.e., you contribute because you want to earn the respect of your peers, and to become an authority of sorts on whatever subject you happen to be interested in.
The article got me thinking about web working, and how much work I “give away”, as opposed to how much I receive compensation for.
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When I explain Twitter to the uninitiated, I tend to describe it as my virtual water cooler. It helps me keep a finger on what is happening outside of my office by letting me listen in on what others are saying. Aliza just wrote about ways to use it for work, and it can indeed be a part of a productivity suite. To me though, much of the chatter is the equivalent of overhearing a phone conversation from the cubicle next to me.
Despite my ever expanding list of folks I follow, I know I am only seeing a portion of what is being said. So I am rather intrigued by a new project called Connect the Tweets. Connect the Tweets collects the top trending items on Twitter and attempts to put them into perspective and context. What is this and why is it trending? These are then posted on the site or more conveniently, distributed back out via Twitter by @cttweets.
It’s a simple concept with a simple implementation that creates a Twitter ticker of sorts. By distilling the massive number of simultaneous conversations happening into useful nuggets, it helps me filter out some of the noise while still allowing me to discover and the conversations that are of interest and importance to me. While Twitter’s own search also presents the top trends, I appreciate that the way that Connect the Tweets turns this discovery process into an effortless one for me.
How do you follow Twitter trends?
At WWD, we’ve long recognized that there are many types of web workers: though the stereotypical web worker may be the always-on-the-go, device-laden, “digital bedouin,” there are millions of others in home offices and cubicles who couldn’t do their job without constant internet use. The latest survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Networked Workers,” shows just how pervasive web work has become. It’s becoming clear that web work, by our expansive definition, is business as usual for many in the workplace - and that, as its growth expands, many of the issues on our agenda are becoming increasingly important.
The bottom-line number from this particular survey is simple: 62% of all employed American adults can be considered “networked workers” (Pew’s term) who use the internet or email at work. In fact, 27% of employed adults report that they use the internet “constantly” at work, with the heaviest internet users being government, educational, and non-profit workers, as well as professionals, managers, and executives.
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