PajamaNation CEO blog August 25, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, blogs and community , add a commentWalter de Brouwer, CEO of pajamanation has been blogging almost daily for over a week now, over on PajamaNationBlog
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.
Working around the limits of geolocation August 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, Pajamanation , 1 comment so farI had some queries over the reliance on Geolocation for managing the local aspect of ‘glocal’ in pajamanation. The logistical problems are well expressed in mediajunk:
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 :
- registered users - they choose where they are .
- visitors - GeoLocation is the only way to know where they are coming from
Web Services Will Be Free August 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, web2.0 , add a commentMediajunk, an internet consulting service explains why the subscripions model is no longer viable. These days you have to make your web services free. Why? Because if you don’t, someone else will - eventually.
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.
Lulu August 4, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Long Tail, web2.0, Wiki , 2commentsI’m very interested in Lulu, so even the slightest mention in one of the RSS feeds I read is worth noting:
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.
I18n coming to Google apps August 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, web2.0 , add a commentAny global organisation needs to cater for a multitude of languages, and the percentage of English speakers on the intenet will continue to decrease as the technology spreads faster to the rest of the world. So you can have a business which restricts itself to the english speaking world and still have a vast potential customer base, but to be the world leader in any general market it needs to be fully multilingual, internationalised, “i18n” as some write it. (because the word ‘internationalisation” has 18 letters). And it’s not just human language, but also currencies, character encoding, dates, time zones, local spelling, postcode formats, weights and measures - the list goes on.
According to Google:
- 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.
Pajamanation Venezuela on TV July 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation , add a commentOn behalf of PajamaNati0n VE, just over two hours ago, Ricardo Del Rio was on Venezuela morning TV talking about the pajamanation lifestyle.
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
Rolling Your Own Online Office July 7, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Microjobs, tools , 4commentsThis is a pretty good introduction and survey of communication tools for distributed teams, written by Josh Catone last month.
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.
PajamaNation is now FREE July 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Pajamanation, Microjobs , 2commentsRegistration for the pajamanation global microjobs exchange is now going to be free, forever. There will be no subscription fee, and no commission or percentage charged on microjob contracts.
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?
Social Objects applied to PajamaNation June 19, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, object centred sociality, Pajamanation, Microjobs, distributed research, London , 4commentsI’ve been thinking about Jyri Engeström’s geek dinner where he outlined the Five Principles of Social Objects. In particular, if this approach is significantly beneficial for designing sucessful social websites then what sort of implications, suggestions and ideas can be generated by applying this to pajamanation, the global microjobs exchange?
- You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.
- 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
- How can people share the objects?
- Turn invitations into gifts.
- Charge the publishers, not the spectators.
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
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
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.
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”
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 socialityHow we build successful websites June 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, London, web2.0 , add a commentAnother reduced instruction set recipe, this time from Last.fm’s Hannah Donovan
- Get your idea out: put perfection behind you.
( because not everything worth doing is worth doing well) - Don’t release new visuals without new functionality
( because form should always follow function ) - Designers and developers work on the same team
- Do the hard stuff first, use iterations
i18n - internationalisation - Use broad brush strokes
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
