I think I’m going to need a WordPress developer of some sort to help me try out an idea I’ve had for better navigation within some of my blogs. To begin with it’s probably just a chunk of code to create a single loop inside a template file, but if it works well there’s a good possibility to turn it into a handy plugin that would be helpful only to certain types of blogs.

WordPress developer required

So where do I go from here? I could go onto one of the rent a coder type sites and ask for a quote I suppose but I thought I’d start by putting this down on my blog so I can refer to it within my networks.

If you think you might be interested in discussing my requirements and starting very soon then do please get in touch.

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Wordpress Developer Required for Small Coding Job

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Location independent working has been a long term goal of mine for many years. I’d like to be able to enjoy an optimum climate by migrating in tune with the seasons, do a lot of continuous touring, and be able to take advantage of property letting opportunities.

I’m in the middle of my first week long experiment working from a location independent from my usual home and workplace. It’s supposed to be a gentle introduction to the practice, but has turned out to be considerably harder than I anticipated. I’m actually at my mother’s house in a small village with no facilities, and with only intermittent and slow internet access. I don’t have my main workstation computer either, but I do have a fairly recent second computer and an EeePC notebook.

The lack of internet is a temporary obstacle, but not the only one. It should be possible to get a USB dongle that supplies some kind of dialup/3G access in most places, albeit much slower than landline broadband in London. At present there are two of us sharing one dongle that only works when the weather is perfect, and even then seems to drop back from so called 3G broadband to an ordinary mobile phone 2G connection which is barely usable. We’ve tried different rooms, orientations, and using the dongle with and without an extension cable. Upstairs and downstairs reception seem to be about the same. But like I say, that’s only one aspect of struggling with getting stuff done from another location.

It took the first few days just to get used to not being able to work online constantly. I’ve developed some alternative tasks I can get one with, but it’s surprising how when one is writing something, creating rich media content, that in theory sounds like it could be done offline, how frequently you do need to access online services. It’s been a habit built up over many years.

Tired of ISP based pop3 email accounts, I shifted to gmail almost as soon as the beta service became available. I maintain working information on private wikis and online documents. My Flickr photostream is more extensive than the iphoto library on any single machine. Reacting to interruptions has been a major stimulus to tackle the tasklist.

But the first thing I learned really, was that the physical workspace is so important. I’m not much of a laptop worker so I got set up at a desk with a borrowed monitor which ought to provide a workstation similar to what I have at home. But of course the room just doesn’t feel the same. Things like relative postion to the window and door, and the height of the desk and chair are obvious factors that need to be set up as close as optimum as possible, but things like acoustics, lighting and proximity to whatever else may be going on in the house can become determining issues as to whether it’s possible to get on with productive work or not.

I found it better for any kind of writing task that needs a bit of flow, for example, to venture up into the back garden and sit in the shed – sorry, ’summer house’. I used to laugh at the ’shed workers’ who built themselves a cubicle in their own grounds but now I think I can see what makes the idea seem tempting.

On the plus side, without the usual online distractions this has provided an opportunity to create some different kinds of content that I might not normallly get around to. I thought I’d do some Screencasts because this is a good way to create video content but then realised that most screencast require an active internet connection, because they are usually demonstrating online tools and techniques. I did manage to think of some functions that are better done by installed offline applications, and image editing is one. Video editing and music production would be others, so there are plenty of tutorial ‘how to’ screencasts that can be created in these circumstances.

The other thing is to write lengthy pieces of narrative that depend mainly on previous experience and life history – autobiographical storytelling. I don’t seem to have done much of that yet though.

So the internet connection, such as it is, can be used just to keep reassured that there is nothing untoward going on out there with my websites that might need urgent attention. Once I’ve got used to that, the compulsion to keep checking stuff should subside and I’ll be able to concentrate for longer periods on the offline tasks that can be progressed in between real world distractions.

Location Independent living is a promise that has been enabled through new technologies but is a practice that requires a lot more than technical skills to get right.

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Location Independent Working

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explore school of everything

Upon arrival at the school of everything homepage, you are greeted with the simple slogan in large bold type “Learn more”

and then you get the chance to either sign up as a person, or as a teacher.

Within the UK, this might provide a vibrant alternative for all sorts of learning which are no longer covered by the run down local authorities’ adult education sectors. The school of everything also has ambitions to become a well populated international website on the global startups scene.

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School Of Everything

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Tom Smith’s the OTHER blog

what I really want to do is create a fork or version of MediaWiki that has all the features I’ve blogged about previously. Yes I want WYSIWYG but I want it to integrate with the wiki when it comes to making links. I want to be be able to create (orphan) pages without creating a WikiWord, saving, clicking to create the page. I want a great design(s). I want a beautifully clean syntax that I never actually use. I want a GUI editor that can interface via XML RPC. I want a super simple installation that asks me what sort of wiki this is to be, personal, shared. I want this wiki also to be a blog (or bliki). I want another million small improvements I’ve developed to do with information design, usability and IA.

In short I want to make MediaWiki for the masses and I want someone else to pay me to make it and give it away for free.

I think it would be great if somebody is willing to put up a bounty for Tom Smith to build the wiki software he’s been imagining for years. It only needs one viable project to make it worthwhile, and then after that it would be open and available for improvement and implementation on any number of others. One possible implementation could be an open community for microjobs exchange.

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Give this man a job building a wiki

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Paypal Payments introduced « People Per Hour :: Community
Buyers will be able to use Paypal to pay for posting a project, as well as for depositing funds to their peopleperhour.com account (to be used for paying providers for work done).

It’s amazing. They didn’t announce beforehand that they were about to make an announcement, and then leave everybody to wait for a while. They just announced it as a new facility which already works. But the question is, will companies and entrepreneurs be willing to pay to post projects or is it expected that everything should be free?

Some have ventured the opinion that free jobs posting boards are worth exactly what you pay for them, and will always fill up with spammy scams. On the other hand, freelance workers want some assurance that they will actually get paid, and handling the transactions through an intermediatory can help to build confidence in a fair marketplace.

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People Per Hour now accepting Paypal

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By reading Walter’s blog now and subscribing you can appreciate the detailed vision that he has for the enterprise called PajamaNation, for the changing world of work and also gain an insight into his unique way of creating a company.

For those interested in blog community structures, the linkroll in the righthand sidebar is actually a list of invited joint authors of the blog, which is managed from within the blogger platform. Public comments are enabled now, and Walter also invites individuals from the company to write posts. My name is there, and I wrote Joining the conversation.

As the story of this company begins to unfold a lot more rapidly starting next month, there’s one thing we can be all be certain of. There will always be plenty of surprises.

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PajamaNation CEO blog

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When Geolocation Gets Too Clever – mediajunk

Geolocation works in two steps:
1. A script detects the user’s IP address.
2. The script looks up a database of IP addresses and their associated countries to tell where the user is located.

There are potential problems with both steps:
1. Many users go through proxy servers, so the IP address that appears to be associated with their computer is, in fact, the server’s IP address, which may be in a different location.

2. There are many databases of IP addresses and their associated regions (some free, some commercial) but none is even 90% accurate. For example, look at this table of accuracy for city geolocation, from one of the leading providers of such databases, Maxmind.

The solution that we will be able to implement is one based on giving priority to user choice, which is always a good thing in my book. So there will be two ways to determine location :

1. registered users – they choose where they are .
2. visitors – GeoLocation is the only way to know where they are coming from

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Working around the limits of geolocation

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Web Services Will Be Free – mediajunk

A bold prediction: many (if not all) of the web services that we currently pay for will soon be offered free.

Two warnings: 1. Your website will need significant numbers of visitors before an advertising-based model becomes workable

2. You have to build a brand, and fast.

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Web Services Will Be Free

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Engineers without Fears: Open Publish (1): The Keynote Cops
Then there was Andrew Pate from Lulu. AP told us about Lulu – on-demand publishing and its role in the Long Tail. Lulu is an interesting service so hence AP’s talk was interesting. Two comments:

* AP noted there is a growing interest in self-published material by book sellers whereas 5 years ago they wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
* From an audience of over 100, only 2 of us had bought anything off Lulu.

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Lulu

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• Fact 1: 65% of Internet users around the world speak a language other than English.
• Fact 2: The Internet’s top 10 languages still only account for around 85% of users — and the remaining 15% represents almost 200 million people.

So they have set about making the paid-for google apps service i18l and have just announced six more languages:

Official Google Blog: Google Apps goes global

Here’s the full list: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Indonesian, Hungarian, UK English and US English.

On another aspect, automated language cognition is always going to be a case of diminishing returns but it would be nice to see some extrension and improvement to Google Translate.

* origin of i18n

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I18n coming to Google apps

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Since he got home the phone hasn’t stopped ringing with over 50 new people in Venezuela registering on the site already.

Without shoes….

Talking about Entrepreneurship 2.0 on TV

More at

Trabajando en Pijamas Libre y Feliz

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Pajamanation Venezuela on TV

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Rolling Your Own Online Office

The difference between the ventures that failed and those that succeeded was how well set up the communication structure was for the team.

I don’t really find the term ‘virtual office’ very helpful when describing an online toolset. To me its a misuse of metaphor. Like who nicked my virtual pencil sharpener, huh?
I have a real office, and it has a computer in it and I use that to communicate with real people in the world using various asynchronous channels. What’s ‘virtual’ about that?

Anyway, getting back to the article it seems to be a big recommendation for basecamp, with which I’m not familiar so I’m wondering if we should be considering that.

One dimension not mentioned is that of language. International distributed teams face communication challenges through the use of diverse languages, or through the participation of many people for whom English is a second language. However fluent and articulate a second language speaker may be, there are always going to be nuances, regional variation and vocabulary shift which can cause endless misunderstanding. Not that there’s likely to be a technological solution to that, but there may be some tools or procedures which wil help.

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Rolling Your Own Online Office

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Just as I pondered after listening to Jyri Engeström, the business model for a sucessful website these days often needs to change. “Charge the publishers, not the spectators”. I’m not sure that we will ever have ’spectators’ as such, but there will be people who are occasional browsers, searching the microjobs exchange just in case they spot something they fancy doing at that particular time. So searching, browsing, registering and placing ‘bids’, quotes or tenders will be completely free (as in beer). Pajamaworkers are also encouraged to consider creating microjobs of their own to place onto the exchange for others to bid on, to become micropreneurs, and there is no charge for this either.

So that’s the announcement over. What are you waiting for?

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PajamaNation is now FREE

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1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.

That would be the microjob. So using the theory, pajamanation is not all about connecting people to people, it’s about connecting people to microjobs. And there are at least two ways to be connected. One person places a microjob onto the marketplace and others apply or bid for it. When a contract is awarded to a suitable bidder then this connects two people together in a working relationship, but this exists via or around the microjob which is central. The pajamaworker and her profile or his portfolio are important too, but they are not the objects around which the action takes place.

Each microjob therefore, needs to have its own page, permalink, unique resource location (URL).

That is the case at present. The url could be more friendly, it could be displayed on the page and there could be more options available to do things with microjobs, but the basic stuctural design is in place, for example:

http://www.pajamanation.com/microjobexchange

/projectdetails.php?jobid=380

Fast typist needed to type 200 page book into a word document

2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It’s clear what the site is for.
   • AWARD a microjob
   • UPDATE a pajamaworker profile
   • CORRECT a microjob listing
   • SEARCH or FIND microjobs – not sure how to resolve this one.
   • VIEW profiles and portfolios

This is harder for us. “Buy” and “Sell” can get confusing when applied to services. A worker is selling his labour, and the job “provider” is buying a service but when you start “bidding” for microjobs it can sound like the other way round. In reality, the bid is an offer to receive a payment hence the description “reverse auction”. It can even get confusing to talk about providers since both ends of the transaction could be regarded as providing something – skills or microjobs.

Additionally we have two major verbs on the website “find” and “search” and it’s not immediately obvious what the difference is. So this needs looking at.

One recommendation would be to have a prominent “Place a microjob ad” button on the main page. Is “place” clear enough?

so the main two verbs should probably be PLACE and BID with these others featuring less prominently

3. How can people share the objects?

Good point. I guess we need an “email this microjob to a friend” button as well as options to add comments and tags right there on the microjob page.

4. Turn invitations into gifts.

As above. If you’re browsing for work and you come across something which isn’t quite suitable for you, but puts you in mind of an appropriate friend thne what better gift than to point them towards an opportunity? So change the wording to reflect that – “Give this microjob opportunity to a friend”

5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators.

Here’s a rub. The original business model for PajamaNation is to charge a moderate annual subscription for access to the local market, a bit more to go global. That’s already different to ebay and many straight job sites which charge commission or make entry level free with a premium service for those who require additional privileges. The idea of charging publishers would imply that the microjobs can be viewed and bidded upon by anybody for free, thus building up a large and valuable readership which is then so sought after by the microjobs providers that they would pay to be allowed to publish jobs, or perhaps to place more than one per month. Something like that. We are currently focussed on the problem of not getting a high enough proportion of microjobs for the registered workers, so charging for placement would appear to be the opposite of what’s required. It’s not completely implausible though, and a flexible approach may help to get geared up for the big picture once things start really moving. I also remember hearing that posting jobs to sites which accept free job ads is a waste of time because they get filled up with rubbish that nobody wants to sift through.

Ok, that process certainly helped to surface a lot of ideas and suggestions for development of the pajamanation site. I hope this starts a dialogue leading to fruitful exchange, faster growth and development towards a world changing service. I published my thoughts here on my blog where participation by all will be welcomed, especially my most valued spectators Thanks again to Jyri for inspiration and bringing theory to the social media world.

object centered sociality

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Social Objects applied to PajamaNation

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1. Get your idea out: put perfection behind you.
   ( because not everything worth doing is worth doing well)
2. Don’t release new visuals without new functionality
   ( because form should always follow function )
3. Designers and developers work on the same team
4. Do the hard stuff first, use iterations
   i18n – internationalisation
5. Use broad brush strokes

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How we build successful websites

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Trabajando en Pijamas Libre y Feliz: The press meeting …

But this was not like any other press launch, Ricardo held it in an apartment, in his pyjamas. Then he explained the serious proposition behind the PajamaNation global microjobs exchange.

Journalists were invited, and a sponsor who covered expenses and donated a prize. As a result, within a few weeks Venezualan Pajamaworkers have rapidly swelled in numbers and been joined by new microjobs providers and more microjobs for them to bid for.

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PajamaNation Venezuela: The press meeting

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I hope they find the Ruby Guru they’re looking for and I wonder if maybe there should be embedded videos enabled for describing microjobs and pajamaworkers.

( via chaosncoffee )

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The Jobs market is broken

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Jay Cross seems to think that the social revolution against corporate ownership of the means of production has already happened:

Informal Learning Blog :: Nonsense from Stephen

In fact, fewer and fewer of us work for corporations; we’re doing our own thing. Free agent nation.

I just wonder how inclusive is that sense of “us” in the context being depicted here. There may well be the beginnings of a trend towards self employment, and free agency. I hope to encourage and enable that trend on a global scale through the Pajamanation initiative , but at this stage it is still a dream of a possible future for the vast majority, and those small numbers who do currently make a living as freelancers are more often than not beholden to one or more large corporations for most of their future contracts.

Work life for the masses is still very much a question of handing over your time and labour power to the owners of capital in return for a fraction of the fruits of those labours, and the reality of so called “self employment” for a lot of trades is often nothing more than a tax ruse by the employers or a means to enable easy laying off of workers without liabilty for redundancy payment.

Within that environment, the ultimate purpose of corporate training is to benefit the sponsor, not the personel’s out of work hours life or future prospects at another employer or as a freelance.

So the reason why some people are passionate about genuinely personal PLEs is because of the potential to shift the locus of power and control in favour of the individual, and it’s no wonder they get twitchy when it seems like there’s a danger of the whole thing getting subsumed back under the wing of the corporate interests and educational institutions.

It’s not just about PLEs really, but the internet. The very existence of a global communications network with limited central control would appear to offer the possibility of a shift in the balance of power on a number of levels, and some of that is already happening to some extent, but is the mere existence of the technology sufficient? The iternet is still very much an infant in the process of being born and the future shape of how social and economic relations will be structured is possibly up for grabs, but perhaps the opportunity will only exist for a limited period. Underneath it all, the most fundamenal contention continues to resurface over who will end up owning and controlling the bulk of the means of production, the means of life. It could be a tiny tiny minority of billionairres as at present, it could be a collective of everybody acting as a whole, or it could be split up amongst all of us as individuals.

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Work PLEs internet futures and social relations

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Pajamanation was an excellent way to get a few jobs done fast and easy.

The Pajamaworker created a fantastic logo, she contacted suppliers for the printing and negotiated with them a great price. I couldn’t have done the job in that timeframe and/or I definitely could not have found a company to outsource this job for 200 Euro!

Katia Peeters, Falls of Sound Hearing services, Brisbane, Australia

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Testimonial

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The Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards | A Fistful of Euros

The Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards
by David Weman

A Fistful of Euros proudlly presents the Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards, celebrating the best of the European blogosphere.

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The Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards

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