In the meantime I'm currently sitting in Marc Canter's living room, about to jet off to Seattle for the Gnomedex conference. Marc's company Broadband Mechanics (which I do freelance work for) has just released People Aggregator and the team is busy at work with that right now. Below is a pic taken last night (by Paolo) of me inbetween two of PeepAgg's development team, Ashish and Gaurav. It looks like we're all hard at work, but actually I think we were just checking our email :-) But seriously, I know Ashish and Gaurav have been putting in a lot of hours on PeepAgg. More soon from me, once I reach Seattle....

My skillset covers:
- Web and technical writing (including software specs)
- Social media analysis and research
- Web 2.0 consulting: including strategy, specs, product design, RSS and blog development, end-user documentation and marketing literature.

My niches are of course Web 2.0 and RSS. Feel free to email me at readwriteweb@gmail.com.

I finished up at my day job yesterday, so as of today I'm working 100% virtually - with people and companies from Silicon Valley, Britain, perhaps even Australia. I do have a little bit of work here in New Zealand and in time I hope to put my Web 2.0 knowledge to good use in my own country. But for now, I'm using the Web to do my business. Skype, Gmail and now it seems Google Talk. These will be my communications nexus.

So what am I up to? Here are some of the things I'll be doing over the next few months:

- Traveling to San Francisco for the first two weeks of October, for the Web 2.0 Conference and to meet with people and potential employers.

- Writing a book. I wonder if you can guess what the topic is? ;-) The publishing contract is all but signed, so I'll give you more details soon.

- Freelance analysis and writing work. Here are just some of the projects I've already done:

- Spec Writing for Broadband Mechanics
- A research assignment on RSS/Search/Aggregation in the media space
- A competitive analysis and product comparison / benchmarking for a magazine website
- Analysis of 'The Long Tail'
- Report on defining the RSS vendor landscape (nb: I will be publishing the data for this soon, here on R/WW)

So if you have any work along those lines, please let me know :-)

I have other irons in the fire, which will be brought to light in due course. Plus I intend to re-design Read/Write Web, as it's due for the next phase of its life too!

For now, I'm going to relax and enjoy my new freedom and my birthday with my family. After that I need to sort out the admin parts of self-employment (home office set-up, taxes and so forth), catch up with blogosphere news, and go to work!

The gist of the analysis is that people who use the internet at work also use it to do work at home; it makes them more efficient but also increases the demands on their time. Any of us who live that kind of life could have told you that - but what we find more interesting is the surprisingly low number of people who say they use certain technologies at work.

Specifically, the Pew study focuses on "networked workers" - defined as anyone who uses the internet or email at their work. At all. Can you guess what percentage of employed US adults say they use the internet or email at their work? Only 62%. Even that number includes people who make only the most rudimentary use of the most simple tools, however. A look at the details indicates that anything beyond the simplest tools (like the browser) is still a real fringe case.

The big take-aways from the above for us? That only 18% of people who use the internet at work use IM, only 10% report using social networks like Facebook, LInkedIn or MySpace and a mere 11% report reading blogs at work.

Only 1 out of 10 people who use the internet at work read blogs about their work; that seems like a real loss of opportunity for them.

If you or someone you love falls outside of these categories - please take our word for it - those are really useful tools! You can communicate really well (instantly, in fact) using IM and there's a whole lot of valuable information on blogs in any field. As for social networks, you'll see the value in those after you get comfortable with IM and blogs.

If you use the internet every day at work but never use IM and never read blogs on your field, you're not really using the internet - or you may as well not be. There's no shame in that, but that's how it is. To be fair, the 60% of respondents who use the internet at work probably includes a lot of people who feel pretty advanced for doing so at all after years of working without it.

Combine these numbers, though, with another reputable survey from last year that found that 11% of US respondents "said they were very or somewhat likely to...implant a device into your brain that enabled you to use your mind to access the internet if it could be done safely." An internet brain implant is a terrible idea, but they should definitely not be given to anyone who's never read a blog at work.

It's even crazier when you look at the chart above. Add the left-most numbers in this chart up and you'll see that 60% of these people use the internet at least once every day at work. But they don't read blogs, use IM or find contacts, answers or other resources on social networks.

Greg Sterling at SearchEngineLand says these numbers are probably low because people don't report accurately how much they use these tools at work - but Pew studies are really well done, they are anonymous and there's no reason to think them inaccurate as far as we can tell.

What Does it All Mean?

The survey and some early analysis of this survey point to the encroachment of work machines into our personal lives. As professional internet users, we'd point instead to the apparently huge gap between early adopter activities and the rest of the "networked world."

This is why Common Craft can make an entire business out of licensing 5 minute videos of stick figures explaining how Google Reader and LInkedIn work. That stuff is like a bright beam of light breaking through the clouds of the modern workplace. It's an important light to look at, too. Though business can clearly be done without meaningful use of the internet (obviously) - competition will likely only grow more intense.

As geek photographer and friend of RWW Aaron Hockley said on Twitter this morning "Social media search feeds. If you're not using them, you're losing business to someone who is." Those who are using them have lots of business to take, too, because almost 90% of people in the US who use the internet at work aren't even reading blogs.

Reporters are shocked by the findings. We're in shock that this is where the state of academic study is concerning social technology use vs. workplace filtering technology when it comes to productivity. A 9% increase in productivity? Try using these social technologies for on topic work and you'll see productivity increases that make 9% look like nothing.

"People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don't," said Dr Brent Coker, from the Melbourne Department of Management and Marketing. Got that? You can spend as much as 20% of your time at work dorking around on the internet and still end up 9% more productive than people who don't! Print this article and put it in your wallet for the next time you get in trouble for browsing on the job, eh?

In fact, this isn't an entirely worthless insight. We like to use StumbleUpon every once in a while just to run some cool water through the pathways of the brain associated with imagination.

Really, though, reading news feeds at work and using social networking sites (especially Twitter) can lead to so many multiples in productivity that any surprise over this 9% finding is hard to wrap our heads around.

On-demand access to geographically dispersed, topic-specific knowledge and feedback through both synchronous and asynchronous communication over multiple technology platforms is what social media use at work can be and that is a game changer. Could someone please study that?

What this study says to us is that the social web is so incredibly powerful that even people who don't know how to use it find themselves made 9% more productive because of it - on accident. Studying that seems like missing the point, though it is interesting.

Photo: Shock-ed by Flickr user CarbonNYC.

At the start of what could be the most open US Presidential administrations in decades, the Sunlight Foundation's work should be more potent, interesting and useful in fostering accountability than ever before.

After eight years of Bush era secrecy, an Obama era Sunlight should have far more fodder to work with. The group's work should be just as important as ever; the new administration is just as in need of accountability around things like corporate influence and human rights policies as any other before it.

The Omidyar Network has a long history of funding experimental new projects on the web, from nonprofit grants like this one for Sunlight to investments in ground-breaking private companies like Digg, Seesmic, Wikia and Linden Labs.

Today's is the third round of funding Omidyar has provided Sunlight, bringing the Foundation's total support for the group to $8 million.

We'd tell you about it, but we'd rather you just go play it. Particularly if you're a Guitar Hero fan. Then take this opportunity to make a mental reminder to check out what Resig does and what Messina finds, too.

The gist of VoiceThread is this: you can upload photos and videos, leave voice or text comments on individual items in a slideshow and draw on the images. It's all in Flash. It's very simple, but the interface looks nice and I'm sure there's market demand for this kind of application. I don't know how many companies have started building something like this, but VoiceThread should finish the job - it's not done yet, in this case at least.

The Problems

Here comes the bad news. Upload took me forever, long enough that I was pretty sure the site was broken. Long enough that I will never use it again and I was soured on the whole experience - but maybe it will work for you. That was for photos, I didn't have the patience to try uploading videos. Hopefully the developers will be able to fix it. Eventually it seems my images did upload but it took probably 15 minutes.

There's no embeddable player, the line drawings fade too fast to do anything with, it's awkward to use. The link for people to pay $29.95 a year for a pro-account should be taken down right away. (Update: The VoiceThread founder says that much of what I say here is inaccurate. See comments below for testimony from happy customers and points of contention by the founder. This was my experience using the app and that's what I'm going to write based on. That's the risk you take asking for a review.)

Despite the problems, VoiceThread could be a nice little application. One of the problems with things like this is that all the work you put into it - or all the work your poor grandma puts into learning how to use it and then narrating over all the old photos you uploaded for her, can't be exported to the desktop and saved. Given the longevity issues of some startups like this, VoiceThread might not even end up being around longer than...well, let's not make any more grandma jokes.

In the end, VoiceThread looks like a half-baked, "light-weight" web app with a good designer and some potential. That's more than can be said about a lot of things these days; if your family doesn't want to use something more powerful, for which all of this is just a feature - then VoiceThread could be just what you're looking for, once it works better.

When it comes to innovation, though, Yahoo is no slouch - and a new day may be dawning there with the arrival of new CEO Carol Bartz. Bartz seems to have a good sense of humor and as the creator of the often-wacky Google Suggest product, we assume Maarek does too. Where would you rather work, at Google or at Yahoo, if you had the choice?

Working at Yahoo may feel less secure, but there's something to be said for innovating further back from the front of the pack. Yahoo has done a fabulous job supporting Open Standards and is doing a lot of very interesting API level work.

That said, if Google Wave points to the future of Google in terms of openness, UI and paradigm challenging - that makes things look very different. Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, recently made just the opposite choice - leaving Yahoo frustrated with the stifling environment there and going to Google instead.

On some level both companies are probably big enough to make many entrepreneurs uncomfortable. We are curious though, readers, if you could choose - where would you work? (Personally, I'm quite happy at ReadWriteWeb.)

Yoelle Maarek has made her choice and we're excited to see what she does at her new gig.

Today, the Creative Commons Foundation is announcing a new tool called CC Zero. CC Zero isn't another legal license from the group, instead it's a legal tool that lets content creators give up the rights claims they are given by default and instead send their work into the public domain.

The Creative Commons Foundation's work is already extremely useful in finding content that's licensed for freely reusable work with certain conditions placed on it, like the section in Flickr where you can find photos you're free to reuse as long as you give credit to the original creator. A new tool that lets authors just push their work immediately into the public domain free of conditions should make content reuse and collaboration all the more friction free.

As things stand, US copyright law prohibits reuse without explicit permission for creative works until they enter the public domain - 70 years after the death of the author or 120 years after publication date if the date of death of the author is unknown. These lengthy periods leave the public domain pretty anemic. CC Zero will let content creators uninterested in copyright claims push their work into the public domain immediately.

A Well-Designed Tool

CC Zero has three components to it. The first is legal code, developed as all of CC's work is to be applicable with laws in every country around the world. The legal work was done in collaboration with two of Silicon Valley's very top legal firms, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Latham & Watkins. It should be pretty air tight.

The second component is a "human readable" text explaining how CC Zero works. You can read the CC Zero FAQ on this page.

The final component is machine readable code, making CC Zeroed content easily discoverable around the web. The Foundation says this should be particularly valuable in scientific work, but machine readable markup is interesting in all kinds of contexts. Try Googling for freely reusable content now to get an idea how this might work.

Early Examples

Two scientific projects are using CC Zero right away. The Proteomecommons Project is an academic project where scientists study large proteins. The Personal Genome Project is putting the genetic data of 10 individuals into the public domain for research using CC Zero.

The Foundation has been gathering Creative Commons case studies in a wiki since the middle of last year; that's a good place to find out about how people around the world have been putting CC's other work to use so far. Hopefully CC Zero projects will start appearing there soon.

The default copyright protection imposed by US copyright law, and increasingly around the world, might serve some people's interests well - but the availability of a tool to give up those "rights" and participate in the global free knowledge economy seems to us a very valuable effort. You can check out CC Zero on this page.

See also Microsoft's collaboration with CreativeCommons on a new scientific ontology plug-in for Office, also announced today.

"Watch for more business deals and from places you wouldn't expect them. I'm hearing from several of my friends, for instance, that AOL is looking for media properties blogging networks."

Interesting... I wonder if AOL read my Network of Niches post - I know some MSN folks did ;-) That post, and the one before it, caught the attention of a few Blog Network owners who pinged me afterwards. I won't lie to you - I'm hoping one of them signs me up, pronto.

You see, I finish at my day job on 24 August and I'm fishing for some blog writing work. I want to do some paid blogging to complement the analysis/research work I'm already doing.

If you'd like to hire a smart, focused, analytical Web 2.0/RSS/Social Media dude for your blog network - send me an email.

This offer won't last - someone is sure to snap me up very soon in this blog network bubble ;-)

Did you know that there are more than 100 people who work in the Oil and Gas industries who use Twitter? There are more than 400 people on Twitter who say they work in a field related to accounting, 115 professional language translators, 75 people who sew or are tailors and 33 people in the Air Force. How well is your industry represented on Twitter? Wouldn't you like to find those people to connect with them?

How Does It Work?

A service of news organization WebProNews, Twellow grabs publicly available Twitter messages, then looks at the bio fields of the users who published them. Those bios are analyzed for a variety of keywords that are then used to categorize the users by occupation or interest. Twellow says it is actively developing ways to search for users on other social network by occupational category as well.

What's New?

Today Twellow rolled out an easy way to log-in to their service and associate your profile there with your accounts on other services. For example, nonprofit consultant Ian Wilker (see below) has associated his Twitter account with his accounts on places like Delicious, FriendFeed and LInked in via Twellow. That's useful for context, richer communication and forming further connections.

We think this kind of simple keyword parsing for categorization has a lot of potential. Twitter in particular is a great way to communicate quickly with groups of people, but it's particularly valuable if you can add people with common interests to your network. Twellow is an important service that's worth spending a few minutes with and keeping track of for the future.

You can find RWW writers in conversation on Twitter here.

"Right now, if you want images, you have two options. You could hire an artist (expensive, difficult, and time-consuming) or you could surf microstock sites (cheap, but frustrating and time-consuming). Pixish seeks to be a middle path," writes Pixish founder and CEO Powazek.

Powazek compares Pixish to Threadless, which uses the wisdom of crowds to design t-shirts, with the key difference being that Pixish members can create open submission calls for any visual product or need. But a better parallel would be design contest sites. There are a number of them, but one of the biggest and most well-known is SitePoint's Contest area (which is in the process of being spun off and rebranded as 99Designs.com).

Similar to Pixish, SitePoint facilitates open calls for design jobs where designers submit work. Unlike Pixish, SitePoint requires that winning designers are compensated with cash. Which approach will work? I know from experience as a volunteer moderator at SitePoint that the design contest approach is often the target of criticism from people who believe that spec work is detrimental to designers. I personally disagree, and know plenty of designers who use spec work like design contests to gain real world experience, build their portfolios, and have also found long term clients by participating in sites like SitePoint's Contest area... but I digress.

I think it is likely that sites like SitePoint's will likely attract more professional designers, while Pixish will attract people who do art and design for fun. For someone who is trying to pay the bills with design work, competing for copies of a magazine might not be the best way to spend their time. But for someone who does design as a hobby, it might be a fun way to hone their craft.

Full disclosure: I recently sold a design contest site that I co-founded in 2005 called GFXContests.com and remain a volunteer moderator on SitePoint's forums (moderators of which also moderate the contests area).

We disagree. We think embargoes can be very useful for all parties. This Fall we published a post about how and why embargoes work in tech blogging and we thought we'd share those thoughts now that the controversy has flared up again.

Why Embargoes Are Good

We argued in our previous post that embargoes are good for the following reasons:

• They give multiple blogs a chance to review a technology in depth, instead of making it a race.


• This means readers get to read multiple perspectives on an interesting topic. Different bloggers have different strengths and ways of looking at things.


• Embargoes lead to more total coverage than exclusives. If you're someone for whom the only thing that mattered in high school was to win the approval of the most popular kid in school and you want to extend that philosophy into your work life as an adult - then the richness and breadth of your work and life experience will suffer accordingly. Exclusives are the tactic of people with weak products and of reporters who compete better in bullying than in writing.

How should embargoes be run well? We discussed our perspective on it in depth in our post Why and How Embargoes Work in Tech Blogging.

We hope you'll join us in the conversation on that post and that you'll continue to email us your embargoed announcements at tips@readwriteweb.com.

Slifeshare captures your Attention Data; it records what applications you use, what web pages you view and for how long. You can post messages and share media. It's supposed to be a social experience and it's got limited value before you build a network. Steps need to be taken to deal with that problem. Think of Slife like a combination of Twitter, the Facebook wall and del.icio.us all wrapped up into one service. This is a complicated enough proposition that lots of little touches are needed - clear communication, tool tips, friendlist prepopulation of some sort- Slifeshare doesn't have any of that.

Users can export their data in XML but at launch there's no other standards being supported. There is an Slifeshare API, which is cool. Unfortunately, the small self-funded team has the crazy idea that users will pay $24 per year in order to access features like the ability to monitor use of more than 3 apps simultaneously and to see who has viewed your Slifeshare profile page. I'm all for charging users for premium accounts but this is not going to work.

Slifeshare is available now as a Mac desktop app or as a Firefox plug-in. There's potential here but major work is needed on the user experience. I don't recommend using it until it's further developed.