Montyland » productivity

OMG, Twitter & text abbr. are nothing new ftw

admin — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:02:50 +0000

A very nice piece by Rebecca Bizonet at the Heny Ford Blog; clearing out archives at the Henry Ford Museum, she has encountered a fair number of telegrams, and guess what – abbreviations and shortcuts associated with Twitter, texting, and the like, are nothing new; our predecessors had to use shortcuts too. Not only for Telegrams, which could get pricey if one got wordy, but also because, as Bizonet credits Stephen Fry for pointing out, during the 17th and 18th centuries paper was a precious commodity and therefore a kind of shorthand was used in order to cram as much content onto a single sheet as possible.

Of Secret Codes, Abbreviations, and Knowledge Lost and Gained « The Henry Ford Blog.

tribes…

admin — Tue, 12 May 2009 19:36:53 +0000

If you aren’t familiar with Seth Godin, his work relates to the shift in communication paradigms brought on by the world wide web, best summed up by his 2008 book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.

Give yourself a treat and watch his 17 min. presentation at TED from this past February, embedded below.

2008: web workers of the world unite!

admin — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:07:38 +0000

If you haven’t ever visited Web Worker Daily you should take this occasion to drop by; it’s a great blog with a variety of info regarding not just how the web works, but how to work with/in/as part of this vast, constantly growing, swiftly changing technological hub.

I’m a daily visitor, and not only a big fan, but today a sort-of participant; they’re having a contest on the site relating to envisioning what/why web work will be/will not be relevant to our future selves living in the year 2008.

So… “2008 will be the Year of the Web Worker because”…

Speaking for myself, it will have to be; I started this year in a job I didn’t like with the notion that I’d more than likely lose said job within the year – which turned out to be clairvoyant on my part…

All of my subsequent job leads have come via the web. What little money I have made in the last seven months (other than the checks I get from the State – and even those I apply for online every week) has been via the web; most infamously, even though the job didn’t fully pan out, my email submission of resume and letter to a local computer store in response to their Craigslist position posting yielded a job interview within sixty seconds of its being submitted. How’s that for efficiency?…

Beyond the personal realm, it’s apparent that 2008 will be the year of the web worker due to the fact that we are heading into an election year (finally) which will undoubtedly prove to be the most web-influenced national election in our history. Add to this the continued shift in our economy – devaluing dollar, continued march of manufacturing and production overseas – and we can see the growing attraction, if not need, for more and more American workers to generate income from their own homes using the tools and skills which are becoming more and more ubiquitous.