Given all of these pressures, it would seem natural for most of these workers to feel at least some resentment towards technology in the workplace, but 72% of respondents argued that technology helps them to do their job better and 81% say that technology makes them more productive.

Do You Stay Connected to Work During After Hours, on the Weekend and on Vacation?

What about you? Do you feel the need to constantly check your work email while on vacation? Do you feel like you are expected to do so? Do you get anxious when you can't check your work email? Or do you just check out, head for the beach and sip Mai Tais?

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....

"The work culture is good, though chaotic," the engineer said. "We're on a ridiculous hiring spree, and getting to the size where communication is difficult, and duplicate work is starting to happen."

There's no way to verify if the poster actually works for Twitter, but the evenhanded tone of the post suggest its authentic. Among the perks of working at Twitter listed in the post: free meals, flex time, "Macbook Pros for everyone" and a flat organizational structure.

"Overall, Twitter's setting a really high standard for what I want from my workplace," the engineer said.

Like any job, however, there are some downsides. The engineer is getting sick of being called "incompetent" by commenters every time a story about a Twitter outage is reported, as well as assumptions from programmer friends about being "really good" and assumptions from everyone about having insider knowledge.

And, of course, something akin to Facebook guilt can be a drag as well.

"People keep apologizing for not having an account to me. Seriously, it's okay," the engineer wrote.

A new startup called CubeDuel accesses your LinkedIn work history and then pits present and former co-workers in Hot or Not style battles. "Who would you rather work with?" the site asks, assuring you that no one will ever know who it was that voted on the duel. The end result is a leaderboard of the most (and least) desirable people to work with at a given company. It's a lot like the online college beauty contest Mark Zuckerberg got in trouble for before building Facebook (FaceMash) but for the workplace.

It's absolutely perverse and it's likely to be huge. This crude pointing at one or the other person, flash judgements regarding a person's relative desirability, is like a car crash of interpersonal psychology. It's also quite compelling. It gets easier and easier after each click.

ReadWriteWeb staff hacker Tyler Gillies says there ought to be a GitHub equivalent for developers to vote who they'd rather collaborate with - but I'm not sure this kind of service ought to exist at all, for anyone.

In some cases, I'd rather work with Deane Rimerman than with former ReadWriteWeb writer Jolie O'Dell. But for other types of work, I'd pick Jolie in a heartbeat. CubeDuel is too cruel to let me say "it depends." Am I just suspicious out of fear that my own co-workers will vote me down for being overly critical? I can certainly get things done! There ought to be a way you can plead your case.

What do you think, is this an interesting application or social media gone mad?

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.

The man is a freelance security consultant with ties to the Chinese government and military. The Chinese government had access to his work, although the man stated he "would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing," according to one analyst.

The spyware's launch was traced to computers at Shanghai Jiaotong University and Lanxiang Vocational School, the first of which counts former government cybersecurity experts among its staff. Both institutions have denied involvement in the attacks.

As U.S. officials continue their investigation, cybersecurity folks and others familiar with the situation wonder at how this series of attacks positions China in the international sphere. Does this news signal the beginning of a new East v. West cold war? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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.

For each news story, TechDygest aggregates coverage from multiple news sources, then offers up a paragraph from each source and links out to the originals. You can generally get a good high-level overview of the news items by looking at the headlines and reading the excerpted paragraphs. You can also get a feel for the tone of the various articles covering the story and pick which one to read based on that.

Give it a try for yourself and let us know if it feels like something you'd come back to regularly for a quick news catch-up. I like it.

Over the last year, I've worked in countless noisy coffee shops and dropped in to various co-working spaces. And I'm not alone. Analytics firm Forrester reported that there were 375 million mobile workers worldwide in 2010, with many of them working out of noisy, concentration-breaking locations where client meetings and phone calls were nearly impossible feats.

LiquidSpace is launching just in time for swarms of mobile workers to descend upon Austin next week for the SXSW conference, and it hopes to do what it does best - help users to "find a great space to work - now."

"We open the doors to a variety of work spaces -- in Austin, the Bay Area, and soon -- across the U.S.," said Co-founder and CEO Mark Gilbreath. "LiquidSpace makes it possible to reserve space that fits the work you're doing, the people you're meeting, and collaboration you're seeking. The result is a more productive and effective mode of work that puts us back in the drivers seat when we're out and about, doing what we do best."

LiquidSpace also makes sure that everything is handled securely for both the worker and the office space provider. For example, if a door code of wifi passcode is needed, it only becomes available once you've checked into that location.

Over SXSW, the company has created several special locations for mobile workers looking for a quiet place to work or meet with clients. The app goes live in the App Store today, so head on over to LiquidSpace and give it a download.

Take a look at the video below for a full walk-through:

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.

But because neither renovation nor innovation did catch up at the speed of our economic development, we crashed. And that's, like with every disrupting event, a tremendous opportunity. It forces us to rethink, because it pushes us beyond the tipping point we tried to avoid for so long.

Currently the not perfectly labelled crowdsourcing is associated with the negative touch of cheap designer specwork and lowest possible labour costs. Despite even that working very well commercially, the real potential will show itself in the next iterations of this trend:

The reason we have company structures and processes, and by now organizations that are being deemed not only too big to fail but also too big to run, is that it was the most efficient way since the industrial revolution. Hiring, training and retaining employees for the assembly line is certainly more effective than trying to build cars with different people each day.

But the web, just like with the music industry, accounting and even your x-ray exams, could do something remarkable to white collar work itself: Making it portable. And turn the whole system upside down. It's now way less complex to tell people who you are and what you need than to tell them what to do. There are tons of people out there who know exactly what they're doing in their respective field. Smart people who even understand your most complex needs.

Using the web to describe whats needed and thus making work more liquid could launch an exceptional shift in how we work: Imagine being able to have the right talent at your fingertips, no matter what the tasks are about today. Or were yesterday. And will be tomorrow.

Imagine being able to design your day, every day: A Twitter style timeline containing work units that are customized to your real interests, expertise and aspirations, aggregated from sources and services around the world.

CrowdConf2011, the industry meeting this week in San Francisco, and the next wave of startups that work to advance those first steps into new areas are capable of changing the way we work forever, to a better. It may be a rough ride with some wrong turns. But I'm fully convinced and confident that whats lurking in there will benefit us all. Welcome to the journey, it has just begun.

Globe photo by James Halliday