All over America, people are choosing to work from home whether they live in a 3 bedroom apartment-mansion or a cozy studio apartment. In fact, LA apartments are teeming with web workers.
A recent publishing endeavor, Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working from GigaOM’s Web Worker Daily, by Anne Truitt Zelenka with Judi Sohn, explores the life, times, resources and tribulations of the web worker (though not entirely exclusively the home-based web worker.) If you’re blogging out of the “office” in what used to be your sweet little one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica, this might be just the book for you.
Zelenka is the Editor at large at WebWorkerDaily.com, a website devoted to the big and small issues of this new work-world. Her years of experience, the significant and commendable body of study that she engaged in, and the work of her co-writers on webworkerdaily.com have given her the ammunition to advise web workers on a whole host of subjects.
As an example, she provides great counsel about managing your email inbox (which for many of us represents an insurmountable pile of we-don’t-know-what.) She talks about software developments, such as Google Apps and Twitter, which help the web worker be even more virtual than ever. She makes recommendations about getting out into the world, to a wifi hotspot where other human beings help break up the day, or to conferences, where the power of connections helps earn you and your work attention – the new big currency online. And she weaves in concepts like the psychology of getting co-workers to adopt new technology whether they are remotely located or not.
There are countless references and links to articles, white papers, research work, blogs, wikis and even text tools. The real shame is that as I read this at night in bed, I wasn’t connected to my laptop and wireless to test all these ideas out and read all these posts. By the same token, you wouldn’t have heard about this book until May – it’s that jam-packed.
Which, to my way of thinking, is all the more reason to pick up a copy immediately . If you’re in the vanguard and working on the web, (and even if your LA studio apartment is your office, you live in your pajamas and you don’t necessarily look smart) you surely want to be smart about how you work. This book will give you smarts and credibility - even if your slippers look goofy.
