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The latest word on globalisation April 16, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : politics , add a comment

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country… All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are destroyed by new industries whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised countries, by industries that work up raw materials drawn from the remotest zones, industries whose products are consumed in every quarter of the globe… The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarous, nations into civilisation.

The above was first published in 1848, by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto quoted in “Globalisation and Imperialism” by Mick Brooks 2006

Globalisation shakes the world April 16, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

BBC NEWS | Business | Globalisation shakes the world

The speed and scale of economic change has made it increasingly difficult for governments to keep their economic destiny in their own hands.

And what is most disturbing for many people is that no-one seems to be in charge, or be able to agree fair rules for the new global economic order.

Web ad spend overtakes newspapers April 15, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : UK , add a comment

Perhaps this is why the national newspapers keep putting their cover prices up and up:

BBC NEWS

Spending on UK internet advertising surged in 2006, overtaking newspaper ads for the first time

Working kills people April 15, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Microjobs, UK , 1 comment so far

Winning by Sharing: Fractional Work. The next small thing?

Research from the UK Work Foundation found that the main cause of the 2.6 million people on long term sickness and incapacity benefit is workplace stress, costing the tax payer billions of pounds every year. Our current command and control organisational model is literally killing people.

Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One April 7, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Microjobs, Long Tail , 2comments

pajamanation has been described amongst other things as a platform for enabling a type of ‘crowdsourcing’ in the jobs market. So what does crowdsourcing mean?

Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One

Crowdsourcing can be looked at as an application of the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the knowledge and talents of a group of people is leveraged to create content and solve problems. The official definition from the term’s originator, Jeff Howe, is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”

Certainly the idea of splitting up one large job into smaller discrete components is present in the microjobs concept, but crowdsourcing seems to be more about getting lots of people to do the same thing, or similar parts of the same thing, and then averaging or otherwise analysing the outputs to create one new insight or product. Using a thousand eyeballs to search satellite photographs for a piece of floating ocean wreckage, each being allocated an adjacent few hundred square metres is a niche requirement that may be well suited to Amazon’s mechanical turk service, but microjobs are more suited to the long tail of requirements, where millions of niche tasks can be created, each one unique with its own short specification, terms and delivery style. There is some overlap in the concepts, but it would be worth explaining the differences at an early stage before the words are fully released into the wild to evolve and degenerate through popular usage into looser, woolier phrases with indistinct or inaccurate meanings.

What are microjobs April 1, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Microjobs , add a comment

At the heart of the pajamanation project is the concept of microjobs

“Imagine a machine that you can put into any country and when you turn the handle, generate jobs. Not regular jobs, but microjobs: short jobs that you can do at home are done and when you are paid you go on a short holiday and you have the certainty when there is another microjob waiting for you. That is living a la carte.”

I know, it takes a little while for the Microjobs concept to sink in. This is not the same thing as telecommuting, working from home for the same employer you used to work for in the office. Nor is it the same as freelancing, where you agree to work on site for perhaps 3 weeks or 2 months for an employer who doesn’t want to create a permanent post. There’s more in common perhaps with the jobbing worker who travels around doing small jobs in which he is proficient for a large number of customers. If you need some private work done on your house you will usually employ a skilled worker who quotes a price to do the job. The advent of the digital age with the spread of broadband internet access means that a huge number of jobs that previously needed a persistent and physical presence, can now be done from home as and when convenient for the remote worker, and providing attractivly competitive terms and deadlines by doing so.

Some employers will jump at the chance to reduce their fixed labour costs and slim down their core business, but many will resist at first, not wanting to give up the control they have over employees lives even while they are not getting paid. They’d like to keep people on a retainer, always avaliable and never working for anybody else but that belongs to the old days now, it’s no longer realistic.

Companies and organisations who learn to make use of the advantages of getting work done through microjobs will begin to replace ones who don’t, and this process will then accelerate. So the microjobs concept when applied en masse, will bring about nothing less than the decentralisation of employment.

Project Teaspoon April 1, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

Google’s Project Teaspoon provides an original way to bypass the telecoms providers ownership of broadband connectivity, thus making a free service available via another utility which every household is connected to. This is a major breakthrough - check the installation description and diagrams here:

Official Google Blog: Project Teaspoon

Then check the date :-)